


various storms and saints

by furtive_pygmy



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alpha Anakin Skywalker, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Canon Divergence - Battle of Mustafar, Captivity, Consent Issues, Drama, Dubious Consent, Jealousy, Knotting, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mental Instability, Mpreg, Not Beta Read, Obsession, Omega Obi-Wan Kenobi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Possessive Behavior, Suicidal Thoughts, Suitless Darth Vader, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:01:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26926291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/furtive_pygmy/pseuds/furtive_pygmy
Summary: "His face is warm and open as he rests their brows together, so much that Obi-Wan could almost mistake him for the man he left on Coruscant. But it's too intimate, too much.Vader looks at him in a soft, secret way that Obi-Wan finds unrecognizable -- a way he suspects only Padme Amidala was ever witness to, before this moment.It robs the air from his lungs as Vader whispers, very softly, “You love me.”On the black shores of Mustafar, a truth is revealed.Obi-Wan is unprepared for the consequences.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader
Comments: 192
Kudos: 797





	1. a vivid nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> after two straight months of obsession i've read all the obikin fics. now i have to write one myself 
> 
> *rolls up sleeves*

* * *

_And the air was full_

_Of various storms and saints_

_Parading in the streets..._

* * *

The world is burning. So is Obi-Wan. 

He is weak -- so _weak_ \-- and the hatred for himself sears almost as viciously as the despair in his heart as he’s brought to his knees. His lightsaber clatters to the rocky black shore, as useless as he is, and another wave of anguish overwhelms him as a dark boot kicks it out of reach. 

_I will_ _do what I must,_ he said, and here, now -- with blood spurting from his mouth and the galaxy crashing down around him -- Obi-Wan recognizes it for the lie it was. A bluff, laid bare and empty. 

When the time came, he faltered. A single opportunity presented itself, and Obi-Wan has failed. 

There will not be another, he knows, gaze lifting at last to the shadow above him. 

_“Weak.”_

Anakin echoes Obi-Wan’s own thoughts, his golden eyes livid even amongst the hellscape of Mustafar around them. Obi-Wan looks into them and waits for death, craves it. He is a coward and a fool -- a hopeless fool --

“To think I ever called you _master,”_ Anakin continues, his every syllable imbued with the dark malice of Darth Vader. Madness glistens in his once-blue eyes, and Obi-Wan feels a mirroring madness claw at the dregs of his soul as Anakin raises his lightsaber. 

“Perfect Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he spits, his features twisted in that savage scowl. “I have always hated you.”

It is the killing blow, Obi-Wan thinks. The descent of the lightsaber is merely a formality. 

He waits for its searing bite, though he is already lost. His shields are collapsing, the emotions he’s kept buried for so long spilling from him in a flood that dwarfs the river of lava raging meters from them both.

It fills his skull and throat and lungs -- 

“You were my brother, Anakin,” he sobs, deaf and blind now to all but the Force, writhing around and within him, screaming. The truth scrapes raw and final from his throat. _“I loved you.”_

He is only vaguely aware of Anakin stumbling away from him in disgust, the saber slipping from his hand. It doesn’t matter now, Obi-Wan thinks. His heart has dissolved. He cannot be hurt, anymore. 

His leaking eyes drift down to the dark rock beneath him, splattered with his blood, and he sways as darkness swarms the edges of his vision.

The Force is _screaming:_ an unbroken, eldritch sound that must reverberate not only through his bones, but the galaxy. Its children are dying, their lights snuffed out _en masse,_ and he can feel himself splintering in the throes of its despair, a dark mirror to his own. 

_Forgive me,_ he begs, before the darkness claims him. _Oh, forgive me._

* * *

_“No.”_

It is a guttural rasp of sound that drags him from the dark, briefly. 

Obi-Wan wants to recoil from it -- to sink back down into the thalassic bliss of oblivion **\--** but with his faint resurface into consciousness he is snared by blinding agony. The worst of it is in his abdomen; he can’t move, can hardly breathe, and only manages to turn his head weakly toward that ugly growling, his thoughts as opaque and insensible as rain clouds. 

“My dear apprentice,” another voice is saying. It is low and sibilant and _foul,_ and a tide of pure, singular hatred propels Obi-Wan further into awareness. “You are beside yourself.”

His right hand is caught in some sort of vice, crushing his palm to the point of pain; in his current state, he cannot hope to escape it. There’s something else, too -- something wrong -- but he can’t pinpoint what that something is, just yet. While he fights the bleary haze muddling his thoughts, Obi-Wan hears that awful voice whispering, “When the time came to betray you, this one didn’t hesitate. Why have you?”

The vice tightens briefly around his hand, and Obi-Wan thinks the bones in his palm might actually snap as Anakin croaks, so close his breath gusts Obi-Wan’s temple: “He is all that is left.”

Ice spreads through Obi-Wan’s veins. He trembles with the sudden urge to vomit -- scream -- as the memories crash over him in their desolate entirety. Lost, all is lost -- 

The Jedi, massacred down to the younglings. The Republic, sieged. Anakin Skywalker, at the forefront of it all. 

His mind is a long red smear, and lurking at the end of it is Anakin, always Anakin --

 _You were the Chosen One,_ he thinks, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks. 

And Palpatine says, “Of what? _Anakin Skywalker?”_

Obi-Wan can hear the derisive sneer in the sith lord’s withering voice, the foreboding laced in his next words: “Perhaps you are not ready to embrace the full power of the dark side, after all.” 

The vice loosens abruptly around Obi-Wan’s hand. He feels Anakin’s suffocating presence withdraw a little. 

“Of course I am, master,” Anakin says, sounding much more collected than he did moments ago. His soft address of Palpatine would spear Obi-Wan in the chest, if he had anything left there. “I will continue to serve you faithfully and bring glory to the Empire,” Anakin vows. 

Obi-Wan manages to crack open his eyes at last in the brief pause that follows. The light is blinding, cold. As the world swims above him, incognizable, he hears Anakin murmur, “I ask only for this one boon.”

Obi-Wan yearns for the darkness from which he’d woken as he meets Anakin’s sickly yellow gaze. The vice around his hand becomes crushing again, but the pain is nothing to the roaring in his skull as he stares up at the remnant of his heart.

He sees now in the sterile wash of light what he couldn't seem to process before, among the fiery wastes of Mustafar. 

“What better token of our victory than the last Jedi?” says Darth Vader, eyes wide and molten in the soft planes of Anakin’s face. Obi-Wan looks into them, and knows that Anakin is gone. 

The sob that wracks him then is as sharp as it is unexpected, pulled somewhere from the abyss in his chest, and he nearly loses consciousness again at the wave of agony that washes over him with the movement. Gasping, Obi-Wan turns his head away from Vader, his breaths labored and his eyes roving blindly over the medical equipment surrounding them.

 _The last Jedi,_ he thinks, and suddenly he understands what it is that rings so wrong within him: the absence of the Force. 

A void yawns around him in its place, bleak and absolute. There is nothing but his body, and the pain wracking it. He is alone. 

The grief of this along with everything else is too much -- apocalyptic -- and Obi-Wan waits numbly for death as Palpatine hums in thought somewhere nearby. 

“His pain is _exquisite,_ ” the sith lord comments. There is a pause, and then: “Very well. Have your prize, Lord Vader. But if he should become troublesome…” 

“Of course,” Vader agrees. “Thank you, master.”

Obi-Wan gives a weak flinch as the hot flesh of Vader’s hand settles over his brow, smoothing away his hair. He tries to recoil, but there is nowhere to go, and he can feel Vader’s will seeping into him, unspoken but implacable. 

_Sleep._

Then the darkness crowds his vision again, and the last thing Obi-Wan hears before he sinks back into its depths is Palpatine’s voice, low and chilling. 

“There will be conditions, of course...”

* * *

The next time Obi-Wan awakens, the pain is gone. 

He is cocooned in something soft and warm, the sensations oddly acute against his bare skin. For a long time he lies unmoving within whatever it is, weaving around himself the futile dream that he is in his room at the Temple. He has just had a very long nightmare, but now it is over and he is home.

In a moment he will rise and fix himself a cup of tea, and the rich slide of it down his throat will wash away the last of that fiery horror from his skull. All is well. 

He lies there, madly sure of it -- and then goes still as something heavy settles on his lower leg, squeezing it through the bedcovers. Obi-Wan bites back a sharp intake of breath, fire jolting from the point of contact up to his groin, his navel, the length of his spine. It is unlike anything he’s ever felt, and he does not move, does not breathe, as the hand drags upwards over his knee, his thigh, his hip, fingers digging purposefully at him through the covers. They grip his wrist, then bicep, curl around his shoulder --

The shield of the bed-cover is ripped away, and what little breath he held is drained from his lungs at the sight of Anakin standing over him, silent. He is dressed in a kind of dark regalia: a stiff collar encloses the graceful lines of his neck, the broad sweep of his shoulders accentuated by a black gorget and pauldrons. His curls are arranged in an artful sweep over his brow, longer than Obi-Wan remembers, and gold filigree glows at the hem and sleeves of his flowing tunic -- a near-perfect match to the lurid yellow of his eyes. 

They ruin his otherwise-flawless beauty, and as Obi-Wan looks into them it falls over him, again: the crushing pall of reality. He claws at the sheets on either side of him, trembling with the sudden urge to scream -- to rake that once-beloved face to bloody ribbons --

“Obi-Wan,” Vader _croons,_ sinking forward abruptly. Obi-Wan doesn’t move, his grief and horror paralyzing him as Vader’s mechanical hand plants itself next to his head, the flesh one snarling into the hair at the base of his neck and gripping tightly. “You’ve come back to me.”

The fervent whisper makes his flesh prickle, his navel tighten with that strange heat, and Obi-Wan’s jaw clenches viciously. Whatever’s going on within him is aggravated by Vader’s proximity, by the scent he carries. Obi-Wan would know it anywhere: the smoldering, firewood fragrance was always distinctly _Anakin,_ offering a comfort and contentment he has never been able to express outside the confines of his chest. 

But even this is tainted, now. 

Obi-Wan recoils as he is flooded by the scent, cloying as blood. Compared to the gentle balm that followed Anakin this is a dizzying miasma, and he desperately presses away from Vader into the bed, his mind a blur of confusion and shock and - 

**_Alpha._ **

Cold foreboding fills Obi-Wan’s insides, in stark contrast to the feverish heat warming his face and neck, his chest. Through the haze of his thoughts comes sudden understanding: Anakin’s suppressant has been removed.

“What is this?” he rasps, his own voice ugly and unfamiliar for the strain of panic threading each syllable. He reaches instinctively for the comforting tide of the Force and is devastated all over again at the wall of nothingness that greets him. Blocked somehow, Obi-Wan thinks desperately. They could not have taken it from him, not permanently.

He tries to focus on Vader’s face, remembering abruptly the savage hatred that so twisted it before, on Mustafar. “Why did you not strike me down?”

At the very least, he should’ve awoken to a cell. His eyes flit briefly over what little he can make out past Vader: a spacious bedchamber, it looks like. But why? To lull him into a false sense of security?

He doesn’t know. He’s missing something. A violent shudder wracks him as he breathes in more of Vader’s scent. It curls deep within him, pulsing alongside his heart.

“All your questions will be answered, in time,” Vader is saying, wretched eyes flitting over his face with an intensity that threatens the last tethers of Obi-Wan’s calm. “Let me look at you.”

“Anak-” his mouth snaps shut, a livid agony bubbling in the hollow beneath his sternum at the reminder that the name on his lips is useless; the man who bore it, lost. Fighting back a sudden tide of useless tears, Obi-Wan whispers the question that has torn at his insides since all of this started -- this rapid descent into madness and horror. “What have you done?”

The anguish centers him a little; helps him rise from the fog of whatever this is. But Vader doesn’t answer, his expression fixed into that eerie focus. His flesh hand moves to Obi-Wan’s face, caressing his cheek with a feather-like tenderness that strengthens the odd pulsing within him. Obi-Wan wants to jerk away from the touch, but is too frightened to dare. 

He was never afraid of Anakin, but the light in Vader’s eyes rouses something deep within him, something nameless and primal. 

_Be still,_ it whispers. _Don’t move._

Obi-Wan obeys. Then that cold foreboding sharpens into great bells of alarm when Vader leans down even closer, and he is arrested by the sudden, terrible instinct to bare his neck. 

It is only by sheer force of will that Obi-Wan remains unmoving, wide eyes locked on Vader’s as the sith murmurs, “Padme is dead.”

Perhaps he was wrong, Obi-Wan thinks distantly. Perhaps his heart has not dissolved completely -- for the remnants of it pulse so awfully within him as he remembers that young woman’s anguished features, her great, blind love. 

In the end, Anakin didn’t deserve it.

 _You brought him here to kill me,_ he snarled, and the last Obi-Wan saw of Senator Amidala was her unconscious, heavily pregnant form laid still on the gray platform. He wonders, amidst roiling horror, if Vader went back to finish the job. 

But no. 

In a flash of clarity Obi-Wan meets those sickly eyes, and once he knows what to look for he wonders how he ever saw anything else.

The savage hatred from before has drained from Vader’s features, but that singular madness has not. It glows in his stare, threading his every syllable when he whispers, “The children, too.”

The air dies in Obi-Wan’s lungs. He can only recoil as Vader continues, with an idle thoughtfulness that makes Obi-Wan want to claw all the skin from his face: “There were two of them, you know. Twins. A boy, and a girl.”

His flesh hand releases Obi-Wan’s hair to wipe tenderly at the tears spilling down his cheeks. Almost to himself, Vader murmurs, “I wonder what she would have named them.”

 _“Anakin,”_ Obi-Wan sobs, his hands damp with sweat and shaking violently as he raises them to clutch at Vader’s tunic. His frail composure abandoned, his chest heaves with the sudden force of his despair, and some distant part of him is still able to feel shame at the display, certainly. But decades of painstaking devotion to the Jedi code cannot quell the devastation consuming him now as he looks up into Vader’s eyes. They are fever-bright, unblinking, dry. 

Padmè is gone -- her children are gone -- and almost as terrible as this knowledge is the sight of Vader imparting this information as if it were someone else who loved her, fathered them. Perhaps it was.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps, squeezing his eyes shut against that wretched yellow gaze. “I’m so sorry.”

He doesn’t know who he’s speaking to; Anakin is gone. There is only Vader looming over him, a silhouette of madness, and Obi-Wan realizes in a tide of grief that he cannot bear it. His heroic former padawan would have screamed himself hoarse at the horror of it all -- would have thrashed and howled and driven his own saber through his heart before he let this come to pass. 

He cannot reconcile that person with the one currently shushing him, stroking his arms as though _he_ were the one in need of comfort. 

“It’s alright,” Vader hums, pressing Obi-Wan back down onto the bed. His palm burns like a brand at the center of Obi-Wan’s chest, too hot, and those chimes of alarm start up at the back of his head again as Vader lowers himself onto the bed with a sigh, his arm snaking around Obi-Wan’s naked waist and pulling him close. 

“I will meet them again,” he says, but Obi-Wan hardly registers the words. _Alpha,_ his hindbrain murmurs as Vader’s scent envelops him, and he understands in a dark flash that he needs to get away -- needs to be _closer_ , to feel safe and comforted in the arms of his -- 

He trembles, paralyzed with bewilderment and disgust, and almost doesn’t hear when Vader tells him, “Now I have you.”

“Me?” Obi-Wan croaks, uncomprehending.

“Yes,” Vader says, with a low tenderness that turns the warning bells in his skull to sirens, high and red and blaring. The blood freezes in his veins as Vader caresses his cheekbone, murmuring, “You are all that is left, Obi-Wan.” 

His face is warm and open as he rests their brows together, so much so that Obi-Wan could almost mistake him for the man he left on Coruscant. But it’s too intimate, too much: Vader looks at him in a soft, secret way that Obi-Wan finds unrecognizable -- a way he suspects only Padme Amidala was ever witness to, before this moment. It robs the air from his lungs as Anakin whispers, very softly, “You love me.”

 _Yes,_ something in him cries. 

“No,” Obi-Wan rasps automatically, and immediately regrets it. 

Like a mirage the softness bleeds from Vader’s features; suddenly they freeze and harden until it is the demon from Mustafar looming over him, that madness howling in its golden eyes as it traps Obi-Wan in the cage of its arms. 

_“You do,”_ Vader snarls, leaning down until they’re nose to nose. His stare is livid, abyssal. _“I felt it._ You can’t lie to me, not anymore.”

Then he leans down, burying his nose in the sensitive junction between Obi-Wan’s neck and shoulder -- where his scent gland lies. Obi-Wan gasps, his head turning automatically to give Vader better access, and the horrible tide of realization befalls him as Vader whispers against his skin, “All your lectures on the folly of attachments, all your perfect Jedi poise -- I see through it, now.”

There is a vicious glee in his voice, a black euphoria when he declares, “You have loved me all along.”

And Obi-Wan would scream at him -- would buck and curse and _tear_ \-- but his skin is so hot, his head too light. There is a pulsing deep within him, and in the spell of Vader’s proximity and touch and rapturous scent, he _understands._

“What have you done to me?” he snarls, attempting to rise, but Vader’s hands snare his wrists and pin him brutally to the bed. Obi-Wan thrashes in his grip, beset with enough terror and betrayal and rage to implode. In the back of his mind runs the looping, half-mad litany: _he would not dare,_ **_he would not dare --_ **

“Hush,” Vader tries to soothe, his knees caging Obi-Wan’s bucking hips. “Hush, my love, and I’ll explain --

“Release me!” Obi-Wan growls, an awful pressure building in his chest. _“Anakin!”_

It is a desperate, senseless cry, and Vader pauses, a series of emotions twisting his features that Obi-Wan is too frantic to read. He lies there, sweating and gasping, his mind racing with the implications of this new violation. Fear pounds at his temples as he glares up at that once-beloved face. 

“You will not call me that,” Vader rumbles finally, hands tightening around his wrists. The instinct to submit to the commanding timbre in his voice is nearly overpowering, and it makes Obi-Wan angrier _(terrified)_. 

“What have you done?” he cries again, though he already knows. Vader frowns down at him, scent sharpening with his displeasure. 

“Don’t be afraid,” he commands, his grip loosening a little. He shifts until he is sitting on the side of the bed, his features softening as he gathers Obi-Wan’s wrists in one hand and pins them more gently to his chest, above his racing heart. 

Leaning down too close again, Vader whispers, “That awful thing the Jedi stuck in you has been removed.” His flesh hand caresses Obi-Wan’s clenched jaw, then trails down to the flushed skin hiding his scent gland. “Now you are as you were meant to be.”

He needn’t say it: Obi-Wan can read the thought as clearly in Vader’s glowing eyes as if he had shouted it. 

**_Omega._ **

And Obi-Wan is paralyzed, his every cell vibrating with the force of his horror, his fear. Surely Anakin would never do such a thing -- never strip him of something so personal, his first and foremost protection. 

The suppressant has been in him all his life. As with all Jedi who happen to be omegas, it reduces his natural pheromones to almost-nonexistence. Everyone -- Anakin included -- always assumed he was a beta, and so Obi-Wan has lived unaccosted by the horrors so often inflicted on those of his designation. 

Now --

“You smell so good,” Vader breathes, face sinking again to his scent gland. Obi-Wan shudders as Vader clutches at him, inhaling long and deep. A telltale rumble starts in his chest where it presses to Obi-Wan’s. 

_No,_ he can only think numbly. This isn’t _real_. Soon he will wake in his own bed to the comforting embrace of the Force, and he will shake away the last dregs of this nightmare with enough relief to drown all of Coruscant. He’ll fix a cup of tea to calm himself, and Anakin will find him --

“You would’ve kept this hidden from me, too,” Vader whispers, and Obi-Wan is torn from the desperate track of his thoughts by the brush of lips against his fevered skin. He gasps, only vaguely aware as Vader continues, “Another _lie._ But that time is past, now.”

And he pulls back at last, his irises a thin ring of gold near-swallowed by black. With a high flush in his cheeks and that fever in his eyes, he declares, “There will be no more lies between us, Obi-Wan.”

“The dark side has done nothing for your foolishness, I see,” Obi-Wan is finally able to croak. A Jedi should not feel rage, but it chokes him now as he glares up at this dark mirror of his loved one. He cannot keep the ragged venom from his voice when he says, “You have betrayed me. _Violated me._ Destroyed everything we fought and bled for, all these years. There is nothing left between us, I assure you - “

 **_“Enough,”_ ** Vader snarls, looming over him, and the rebuke is so powerful Obi-Wan nearly goes limp despite himself. But he’s already decided he would rather be dead than stay tuned for whatever Vader intends for him, and in a burst of suicidal audacity snarls back, **_“Or what?_ **What will you do that you have not already done?” 

He’s crying again, tears sliding hot down his cheeks, but it doesn’t matter -- nothing matters, now -- 

“I loved you,” he sobs, as Vader rears back, speechless. “More than anyone. And it was for _nothing_ , Anakin. _Nothing._ You are a sith, a traitor, a _slayer of innocents!_ In my weakness I did not strike you down, and all the galaxy will bleed for my mistake..”

The confession leaves him drained and hollow, weeping. _I am not myself,_ he registers dimly. Perhaps he never will be again. He scrounges half-heartedly inside of himself for the powerful, unflappable presence of General Kenobi -- the Negotiator -- and finds only ashes. So be it, he decides, looking up into the face that was once Anakin’s. If his padawan is truly lost, it is only fitting that he follow. 

Vader’s face is slack with shock for several seconds. Obi-Wan can see the exact moment he begins to process the words spewed at him: his features twist into something unrecognizable, something worse than even the demon of Mustafar -- for he sees pain as well as rage in the sudden well of tears in Vader’s eyes.

Releasing Obi-Wan, he draws back slowly from the bed, and there is something much more eerie about the controlled calm of his movements as he draws his saber. 

There is a long silence. Obi-Wan slowly pushes himself into a sitting position, glad for the adrenaline currently rushing through his veins. It overtakes his body’s traitorous mechanisms, somewhat. Lets him _think._

Vader is looking at him as though he holds the secrets to the universe. His singular attention is a supernova, dazzling and nuclear and morbid, made worse by the limpid madness in his eyes; close to overflowing, but not quite. 

Obi-Wan couldn’t say how long they gaze at one another, before Vader at last whispers, “Do you hate me, then?”

And in his newfound clarity, Obi-Wan understands two things: if he says _yes,_ Vader will promptly lop his head off. If he says _no,_ he is sure to be raped at some point in the near future. Repeatedly.

Obi-Wan weighs his options. 

While he’d been eager to die a few moments ago, his current lucidity imparts the understanding that he cannot afford to. However powerful Palpatine is, he could not have razed the entirety of the Republic to dust in the time Obi-Wan was unconscious, even with Vader’s combined power. There will be resistance; remnants.

Jedi. 

Vader said he was the last, Obi-Wan remembers dimly, and though the thought leaves him with a bone-deep cold, he clings to reason. They cannot have slain _them all_. What remains of the Order is surely scattered throughout the galaxy, his remaining brothers and sisters lost and afraid. 

Obi-Wan cannot abandon them. 

In the end, it’s as simple as that. 

“If I hated you,” he says, heaving a great sigh, “you would be dead.”

Vader’s mouth twists. He ignites the saber, and all of Obi-Wan’s worst nightmares are realized in a wash of crimson light. 

It is a sith’s blade. Obi-Wan does not flinch as Vader points the tip at his throat, so great is his disgust. The red light shrouds them, morbid and hateful, and he wishes he could sink away from it, away from the pain and the rage and the horror -- back to the blissful dark of oblivion. 

But he is a Jedi. 

_There is no emotion, there is peace._

Those wretched eyes are even ghastlier in the saber’s bloody glow, boring into his like the twin suns of Tatooine. 

“That’s not good enough,” Vader whispers. 

The tip of the lightsaber trembles inches from his throat. Inhaling its plasma odor, Obi-Wan carefully raises his arms. 

“Anakin,” he calls, hating the way his voice breaks. “Come here.” 

“Don’t call me that,” Vader hisses. He stands there trembling for several more seconds, his jaw clenched so tightly it looks painful. Then he deactivates the saber, and flings it a short distance away.

Dread and relief war for dominance in Obi-Wan’s chest as Vader sinks at once towards him, the last dregs of that mad rage draining little by little to a tentative, childlike hope.

“Come here,” Obi-Wan murmurs again, willing down the tumult of his emotions so he can accept Vader’s weight into his arms. Even now, after everything, it feels _right_ in a way Obi-Wan would rather not examine, and he does not resist as Vader gathers him into a crushing embrace, face burrowing in his neck. 

“You can’t hate me,” Vader whispers into his skin. He is trembling, arms corded with a thrumming tension in their brutal wind around his body. “ _You can’t._ You’re all that’s left, Obi-Wan.”

Qui-Gon would have kept him from this, Obi-Wan thinks, numb fingers carding through Vader’s curls. In his master’s wake he had only ever been a clumsy substitute -- a blind fool -- and he trembles to behold the consequences of it now, held fast by his padawan’s shell. 

_I’m sorry_ , Obi-Wan thinks to them both. 

“I could never hate you,” he murmurs, and the ugly, perilous truth of it is enough to make his heart sink in the trappings of his chest. Vader shivers, though Obi-Wan isn’t talking to him.

Burying his nose in Anakin’s soft curls, he tells him what he should’ve long ago (though it’s too little, too late): “I love you, Anakin.” His voice cracks. “Very much.”

He closes his eyes, imagining that the man he holds is the one who smiled so bashfully at him on the landing platform in Coruscant -- whose parting words were, _may the Force be with you._

“I will always love you,” Obi-Wan whispers. 

Another, more violent tremor wracks Anakin’s body. Clutching at Obi-Wan as though he were drowning, he raises his head at last to press their brows together. The world narrows to the molten gold of Vader’s eyes; they are clear and bright -- and it is Anakin who breathes, “I love you too, Master.” 

Obi-Wan jolts, a weightless shock electrifying his heart, his skull. His hands shake violently as he raises them to cup Anakin’s face, not daring to hope. “Anakin?”

But it’s only a moment, a window - those clear eyes just as suddenly grow murky again, deepening back into the burnished taint of barely-restrained madness, and Obi-Wan is torn between a wild elation and despair as Vader jerks back from him, blinking. 

They stare at each other, the silence bleeding between them. Obi-Wan wants to call to Anakin again but does not quite dare, and so can only watch as Vader stands. A wordless tension stiffening his movements, he goes to retrieve his saber.

“You’re going into heat,” Vader say abruptly, tucking the saber into his belt. He’s paused with his back to Obi-Wan, likely sealing away that brief remnant of Anakin Skywalker, but it’s too late. Obi-Wan has _seen_ , and the blood in his skull roars so loudly he almost doesn’t hear as Vader continues, “It will be your first, thanks to that cursed implant -- and highly difficult, according to the med droids. They tell me you may not survive it, unattended.”

_Unattended._

Obi-Wan swings his feet onto the plush carpeting, noting his nakedness with a flicker of dismay. The air circulating the chamber is blissfully cool against his skin, however. 

“You wish to _attend_ me, then,” he murmurs, but the swell of horror he expected doesn’t come. He’s too busy processing that brief moment when Anakin came back to him, like the sun through storm clouds. For just a moment, he was there. 

Vader turns back to him at last. His face is shuttered and unreadable, wiped clean.

“Of course,” he says. His eyes drag down the length of Obi-Wan, and his gaze is hideous -- _incinerating --_ in its hunger. “You are to be my mate.”

  
  



	2. impotence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks so much for the support!

The declaration stuns him, yes. But it’s the fury that really bowls Obi-Wan over -- forces him to his feet, at last. 

His legs wobble beneath him, stiff and awkward in a way Obi-Wan can only spare a vague alarm for, so potent is his rage. Steadying himself on the nearby nightstand, he gathers the bed covers in front of his groin in a last-ditch effort at propriety and spits, “Have you lost your mind?”

Vader’s eyes narrow, his scent spiking in displeasure, but before he can respond Obi-Wan barrels on, “Your _mate_ is gone.” 

His heart constricts again at the memory of Senator Amidala, so clever and willful and brave. Watching the color drain from Vader’s face, Obi-Wan chokes out (perhaps fatally), “Your children, too.”

And stars, how the knowledge of their loss _eats_ at him. It is a knot of vicious sorrow at the back of his skull, penetrating the soft tissue of his brain in an almost-physical agony. 

Anakin’s children. _A boy, and a girl._

Snuffed out, along with so much else. Obi-Wan shakes his head, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks.

“Will you not mourn them?”

Between one moment and the next, Vader is on him. Obi-Wan gasps as he is pinned to the bed by his throat, mechno fingers wrapping around his neck in a brutal vice. Vader kneels over him, wild-eyed, and Obi-Wan is both afraid and relieved at the look on his face: afraid, because that look foretells a swift death -- and relieved, because this feral anguish is so much better than the eerie detachment Vader had shown earlier, when he first spoke of them. 

Now he bares his teeth, snarling, “Speak of them again and I will _break you,_ Obi-Wan.”

His voice is a rough scrape of sound, and Obi-Wan wheezes as the mechno fingers tighten around his throat in emphasis of Vader’s words. 

Obi-Wan should submit, must submit. Vader’s scent and proximity are overwhelming, and every long-buried instinct of his designation screams at him now to go limp, bare his neck, beg forgiveness. More than that, he is supposed to be preserving himself for the greater good of the galaxy. He is _needed --_

_“I cannot -- replace -- what you’ve lost,”_ he chokes out anyway, hands prying uselessly at Vader’s. Black creeps into the corners of his vision. His world has narrowed to Vader’s twisted face, and perhaps he should just let it be -- let the hand that saved his life so many times over crush his trachea and claim its due. It would be easier. 

_“Anakin,”_ he cries. 

Impossibly, the madness stutters. 

Vader blinks, something unreadable rippling across his features. He releases Obi-Wan’s throat abruptly, launching away from him as though burned, and Obi-Wan is vaguely aware of him drawing backwards as he clutches at his throat, gulping precious air. 

His loud gasping is the only sound for several minutes. Each breath he draws is scalding, and his neck throbs viciously; the forming bruises will be stunning, Obi-Wan is sure. It is some time before he has the wherewithal -- _the courage_ \-- to get his elbows underneath him, and look for Vader. 

The sith stands at the window taking up most of the opposite wall, his trembling form made almost ethereal by the moonlight streaming in. Past him, Obi-Wan can make out a line of cliffs and glittering waterfalls, blanketed in starry night. Naboo, he’s almost certain. 

His vision blurs a little as he stares at Vader’s hunched back. The fever’s setting in, again. 

“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here,” Vader finally speaks, hands shaking fists at his sides. He turns to Obi-Wan, moonlight glowing in his air and glancing off his cheekbone. Even now -- even now he is beautiful, the undulation of his rosy lips hypnotic as he hisses, “So I will warn you, Obi-Wan. Just this once.”

He steps forward, and Obi-Wan moves backwards despite himself, one hand pressed to his aching throat while the other scrabbles blindly for the headboard behind him. He presses himself against it, sweating as Vader continues, “Your life hangs by a thread. My master wants you thrown to the breeding pits of Bendeluum, where men and beasts and stranger creatures would quite literally kill to knot the last Jedi.”

Obi-Wan feels all the blood drain from his face. His shallow, rasping breaths fill the space between them as Vader closes in once more. Planting his mechno hand on the headboard beside Obi-Wan’s head, he leans in, whispering, “We both know there is no better way to break you.”

His flesh hand comes up to cup Obi-Wan’s jaw. Ignoring his flinch, Vader looks into his eyes and says, “How many of them could you take, I wonder, before you begged for death?”

Obi-Wan does not move, does not blink. 

Terror the likes of which he’s never known pounds at his temples. He’s heard talk before of Bendeluum: an Outer Rim planet infamous for its gladiatorial arena as well as its heinous treatment of omegas. It’s reportedly so terrible that, even suppressed to the point of non-designation, Obi-Wan and Jedi like him were always stridently warned away from the planet. 

_The breeding pits._ His teeth grit against a surge of nausea. Of them he has heard only whispers, but even those were enough to freeze all the blood in his veins. 

“My master is very interested in knowing,” Vader continues, studying the fear surely etched in his features. “It would amuse him to see the great Obi-Wan Kenobi brought to that.”

It is one of the rare times in his life where Obi-Wan has no words. He swallows roughly, trying to think past the panic thumping at the backs of his eyes. Vader’s thumb swipes his bottom lip. 

“But I have saved you from that fate,” he whispers, leaning their brows together a second time. “I have saved you, because you are mine.”

His flesh hand drops to Obi-Wan’s waist, fingers digging fresh bruises into his flesh as he goes on, impassioned, “You are _mine,_ and beneath my hands and teeth you will be remade.”

He noses along Obi-Wan’s cheek, murmuring in his ear, “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan gasps. There is nothing else to say, no defiance left to offer in the wake of Vader’s warning. He can only think of Bendeluum as Vader draws back from him, satisfied. 

“Good,” Vader says. “Then I will leave you, now.”

He pauses to consider Obi-Wan, his features schooled into a smooth nothingness. “A med droid will be by to see you, soon. Try not to give him too much trouble.”

Obi-Wan stares at his lap. After a few tense beats, Vader tells him, “I’ll be back soon.”

 _And then?_ Obi-Wan wants to demand, but his voice seems to have stuck in his throat. He continues to stare at his taut thighs, his heart thumping a messy staccato as Vader finally turns and leaves. Even when the doors slide shut behind him, locking loudly, and Obi-Wan is at last alone, he can’t seem to move. 

There is only the roar of blood in his ears - the smearing, half-formed images of faceless shadows converging on him, wicked and insatiable. And he would surely be in heat, he would -- _they would --_

Obi-Wan clutches at his head. Lets out a long, unsteady breath. 

He is a Jedi. 

_There is no emotion, there is peace._

But there is no comfort to be drawn from the old words now, no way out of this that he can see. His fever has not receded, despite Vader’s departure. His skin is flushed and oversensitive, his breaths labored, his head light. There is a pulsing deep within him. 

Obi-Wan lifts his head, eyes settling blindly on the moonlit cliffs of Naboo beyond the window. Alone, with nothing but the desperate whirring of his mind, the Code and his training and all the values ingrained in him till now feel as distant as the stars. 

Worse than that -- worse than anything -- 

He is afraid. 

* * *

The Emperor studies the holocron, his malformed features highlighted in its pulsing blue glow. 

“Kenobi remains untouched,” he remarks, turning the cube in his gnarled hands. On the stretch of floor before his throne, the limp form of a togruta girl clings to life. Vader studies her surreptitiously from where he stands at the circular viewport behind his master’s throne. 

The rapid rise and fall of her chest as well as her dimming Force signature tells him she will be dead soon. Her dark amber skin is charred and smoking in several places from his master’s power, her marked face twisted in agony. Something tightens deep within him as he watches the young Jedi scrabble weakly at the floor, a broken moan piercing the heavy silence of the throne room. 

He recognizes her, vaguely. Perhaps they fought together, once. 

It doesn’t matter. She is a Jedi, a traitor, a threat. 

Still his chest loosens as he studies her montrals, her markings. However much the blood rushed to his head upon first sighting her, she is not Ahs -

“Have you changed your mind about him, after all?” his master asks, looking at him for the first time. 

Vader tears his eyes from the girl to gaze instead at the holocron in those white, gnarled hands. Supposedly it contains information about the Jedi’s remnants -- that much they were able to get from the togruta -- but he is unable to open it. Nor can his master, it would seem. 

“He's only just awakened,” Vader replies, imagining his saber erupting through the dark mass of the Emperor’s chest. “Kenobi is in quite a bit of distress, but maintains enough presence of mind to insist on provoking me.”

On the floor of the throne room, the togruta’s breathing takes on a distinctive gurgle Vader once heard dubbed a death rattle. It lifts the hairs on the back of his neck, though he’s no stranger to it -- has summoned it from many creatures, even.

She’s still moving, though -- still trying to get her arms beneath her -- and Vader wonders what her name is. If she’s afraid to die. 

He does not look at the girl when he murmurs, “It would please me more to break him thoroughly before I give my mark.”

The Emperor makes an ugly, hissing sound he realizes belatedly is laughter. “How patient of you, Vader.”

Those yellow eyes settle back onto the holocron. The Jedi may as well be a mote of dust, for all the attention he spares her. “Take care that you leave something of him intact,” Sidious orders, after a moment. “He may yet prove useful…”

Vader has to suppress a flare of fury at the thought of Sidious having _any_ use for Obi-Wan. They are playing a very delicate game, after all. If the Emperor decides Obi-Wan is a threat to his authority, then he will order him shipped to Bendeluum -- and despite their earlier confrontation, Vader would sooner tear out his master’s throat with his bare teeth than let that happen. 

But it must not come to that, not yet. There is still much to learn. And in the frank confines of his head, Vader is not sure who would win in a confrontation between himself and his master. Sidious is sly about what he reveals of himself; Vader is certain he has only seen a fraction of the Emperor’s full arsenal. He must tread carefully. 

When the time comes, he will do what he aches to even now, as the Emperor speaks idly of his mate and the togruta girl lays dying. And when Sidious’s hollowed remains hang crucified among the spires of Coruscant, Vader will assume his rightful destiny: the harbinger of a new age.

He can see it so clearly it could almost be one of his visions: Obi-Wan standing resplendent at his side, looking out together over his assembled forces, a sea of perfect white. The galaxy and all its trillions will tremble to behold them. 

The image brings a swell of joy that takes him by surprise, nearly escaping the subtle shielding he has erected around the core of himself. Breathing it away, Vader gives Sidious a curt nod. “Yes, master.”

He can play the part of the loyal lapdog for now, if it means cementing that future. Really, there is very little Vader wouldn’t do in its name.

“Good,” Sidious is saying. His eyes settle at last on the togruta, and there is no glee or hatred or even anything at all in their golden depths. The Emperor gazes down at her as though she were nothing -- dead air -- and says to Vader, “Finish it, then. The little Jedi is of no more use to us.”

He’s perfectly capable of doing it himself, but it pleases Sidious to see Vader do it, especially when they recognize him. This girl has given no sign that she does, but Vader suspects the command stems from her resemblance to --

He silences the thought, nodding again to his master. “Of course.”

The click of his boots is deafening as he approaches the girl. She has given up trying to rise, and lies collapsed with her cheek pressed to the floor. Her eyes roll vaguely in his direction, murky and unfocused. They are a rich amber color. There is no recognition in them. 

Vader stands over her, the smell of burnt flesh assailing his nose. The Emperor’s gaze lifts the hairs on the back of his neck while he activates his saber. He sees the girl’s eyes clear a little as she focuses on its crimson light. 

She is Jedi filth, he thinks, raising the blade. The girl watches him now, that awful rattle in her lungs, and in the moment before he drives its searing length into her back Vader can think of nothing but the fact that she refused to open the holocron, even as her skin blistered and blackened and her screams reverberated throughout the hall. 

He thinks of this, and that odd tightening worsens within him, though his face doesn’t twitch. Vader clips his saber back to his belt and steps back, as though to appraise his work. Sweat gathers at the nape of his neck. 

The girl lies still, her amber eyes glassy. She is dead -- she is dead but Ahsoka is not --

“Good,” the Emperor says. When Vader turns back to him, it is to find the Emperor’s attention arrested once more by the holocron. As if privy to Vader’s thoughts (and doesn’t that strike cold into his heart), he murmurs, “One less Jedi to wonder about. Perhaps your former padawan will be next.”

Vader nods, wondering at the flash of red across his vision. “I look forward to it,” he says, with a smile that is perhaps a little too close to a snarl, if the way the Emperor regards him is any indication. But after a moment Sidious smiles back: a slow, ugly curl of his thin mouth. 

“Indeed,” he answers. 

* * *

The med droid comes and goes, nearly driving Obi-Wan mad in the process. 

_“_ You are entering _homo estrus,”_ it informs him after brief introductions, its tinny monotone grating immediately. “Often referred to informally as ‘heat,’ it is a complex reproductive process involving three stages in which an omega becomes physically and emotionally receptive to copulation with -- “

“I am **aware,”** says Obi-Wan, through tightly gritted teeth. Busy rifling through the suite’s various drawers and wardrobes for clothes -- or anything else that might prove useful -- he says over his shoulder, “Is it reversible?”

 _“_ I am afraid not, sir,” the droid says, just behind him. _“_ The natural processes of your anatomy have been suppressed for over thirty years. As a result, you are experiencing a cascade of hormones that will cause multisystem havoc and likely death, if interrupted at this point in time. They must run their natural course.”

Obi-Wan turns to face the droid, and is stopped by the blue glare of its scanner as it sweeps him head to foot. His jaw clenched viciously, he weighs the benefits of attempting to dismantle it as the droid beeps loudly and continues, “You are progressing rapidly through the _proestrus_ stage. Sensors indicate twelve standard-hours and fifty-two minutes before onset of _estrus.”_

Fear coats Obi-Wan in a cold slick tar. Swallowing hard, he pushes past the droid towards the fresher tucked into the corner of the suite. There he sets aside the tunic and leggings he’s gathered, goes to the sink, and splashes water onto his burning face. 

What he finds when he looks up into the mirror is one more unpleasant surprise: he’s clean-shaven, and his hair is longer, red-gold strands grown almost shaggy as they fall into his eyes. He’s lost weight, too. Less surprising are the bruises ringing black around the pale skin of his throat: perfect, painful impressions of Vader's wrath. Studying them, and then the odd new sharpness of his cheekbones, Obi-Wan waits until the med droid fills the doorway, before croaking, “How long was I unconscious?”

He already knows he will not like the answer, and flinches anyway when the droid says, "Three standard-months, sir, following surgical intervention.”

Obi-Wan’s gaze doesn’t move from the mirror. He looks young and frightened and abused, his pale eyes bright and gaping in the sharp lines of his face. There is a high flush in his cheeks, sweat on his brow. 

“Tell me everything,” he says. 

His surroundings smear in and out of focus around him as the droid obeys. Listening numbly, Obi-Wan learns that the savage, Force-assisted kick Vader aimed at his abdomen following Obi-Wan’s failure to kill him caused severe internal hemorrhaging and shock. As it speaks he remembers the taste of blood in his mouth, how it spurted onto the black rock. The med droids were only barely able to save his life. 

Obi-Wan’s eyes fall shut when the droid informs him he has been floating in a bacta tank almost the entire time since then. Through the Fall of the Republic, the rise of the Empire. The annihilation of the Jedi.

“Your hormone suppressant was removed precisely forty-eight hours ago. A simple surgical procedure,” the droid is saying.

When Obi-Wan doesn't reply, it goes on, “We intended to observe you for longer, to determine for sure the safety of the removal, but Lord Vader insisted on your transport to Naboo.”

He opens his eyes, and is startled again by the stranger looking back at him. Leaning heavily on the sink, Obi-Wan asks, “Transport from where?”

“Coruscant, sir.”

The seat of Palpatine’s new Empire, no doubt. 

Beset by a wave of rage most unfitting of a Jedi, Obi-Wan begins to pull on the tunic and leggings, wincing at the slide of the fabric against his over-sensitive skin. 

“Tell me something,” he grits, wiping at the sweat on his face. “What will happen if I choose to avoid... _copulation..._ once I’ve entered _estrus_?”

The droid makes a whirring sound, as though processing the question. Obi-Wan waits for its answer, his heart racing. Fully dressed now, he keeps his gaze away from the grim man in the mirror, hanging on the droid’s every word when it finally says, “Estimates put your likelihood of death by estrotoxic crisis at fifty-four percent. Four times the typical rate.” 

The droid pauses. “It is strongly recommended you do not make such a choice.”

Obi-Wan would throttle it, if he had the energy. As it is he can only push past the hunk of metal, clenching his teeth at the wave of lightheadedness that stops him short from pacing the room.

“Your febrile state appears to be worsening, sir,” the blasted droid hums behind him, the blue light of its scanner sweeping his body yet again. _“_ It is advised you lie down to minimize the risk for falls.”

Unfazed by Obi-Wan’s glare, it tells him, “I will retrieve refreshments for you, as well as bacta patches for your bruises. Please be sure to eat and drink, while you still can.”

Obi-Wan watches the droid whir past him, wondering if it means to sound so ominous. After a split second he follows it to the doors, adrenaline surging through him when the sensor above them lights green, and they slide open. 

He won’t get another chance. Weaving around the med droid, Obi-Wan attempts to dart through the doors into the moonlit corridor beyond -- and collides with a wall of pure energy. Vader, he realizes instantly. The barrier ripples crimson when he beats at it, impenetrable, and Obi-Wan feels a flash of foolishness as he stands back, hands flexing at his sides. 

The med droid passes him a moment later, whirring through the barrier as if it were water. Turning back to him, it says, “That was ill-advised, sir.”

The doors slide shut before Obi-Wan can think of a retort. Resisting the urge to scream, he swipes viciously at the sweat-damp hair falling into his eyes, and paces the room. The clothes he’s pulled on are made of the softest synthsilk, and yet they stifle him. He wants to tear them off, to destroy everything not bolted down. 

The bruises throb around his neck. It’s been perhaps an hour since he woke to this nightmare, and reciting the Jedi Code isn’t working, anymore. He cannot release his volatile emotions to the Force, cannot think past the fact that he is well and truly trapped. 

_Still,_ Obi-Wan thinks, stopping in front of the window. _Still..._

While a fifty-four percent chance of death is nothing to smirk at, he’s faced worse odds. He’ll just -- ride it out. He has to. 

He’s nodding to himself, decided on the matter -- when he realizes he never asked the med droid how long _estrus_ would last. Obi-Wan turns away from the window, and goes to sit slowly on the bed. He vaguely recalls the average heat occurring over seven standard-days, but he’s not sure if that’s just _estrus_ or includes all three stages. Obi-Wan prays it’s the latter. Really, it doesn’t look good either way.

He must learn how they’ve blocked his Force connection. It’s his only hope. 

In another burst of temper he tears off the tunic and leggings, but the chilled air of the suite offers no relief, this time. Groaning, he stretches out onto the bed, his head turning toward the mattress. _Oh_ , something whispers in the back of his head. 

Anakin’s heady firewood scent clings to the sheets, and as Obi-Wan inhales it all his thoughts and discomfort and fear recede a little, like waves on the sand. His mind is almost blank as he turns onto his knees and shoves his nose into the fabric, chasing the too-faint fragrance. It is comfort, safety. 

_Home._

Something warm and viscous gushes from deep within him, coating his inner thighs. 

Obi-Wan freezes. Face still buried in the bed, he raises a slow, tentative hand underneath him, and finds his entrance wet and throbbing, unbearably sensitive. Seeping from it is a sticky wetness that reeks candy-sweet when he brings his fingers back, examining the slick with burgeoning horror. 

It’s only the beginning, he knows, looking down at his erection. It will get so much worse. 

Contemplating the dignity of curling up into a ball in the shower, Obi-Wan hastily wipes his hand on the sheets. One thing is perfectly clear: however bad it gets, however long this lasts -- 

Vader must be avoided at all costs. 

* * *

Hours pass. 

Obi-Wan showers, and though the water is ice-cold it does little to soothe his torment: he quickly reaches the point where he can’t bear the chafe of fabric against his skin anymore. Being naked isn’t really an option either, however, and so he settles for a loose pair of synthsilk shorts.

Obi-Wan avoids the bed. 

A short while later, the droid returns. Obi-Wan grudgingly accepts the food and medicine it’s brought, though he has no appetite. 

“You must eat slowly,” the droid counsels. “While your gastrointestinal system is fully healed, it has not functioned for some time. The reintroduction of foods and liquids must be gradual.” 

Nibbling half-heartedly at a piece of fruit, Obi-Wan asks, “How long does the _estrus_ stage last?”

“Around three days for the average omega,” the droid replies promptly. “But in your case it is difficult to say, sir.”

“Right,” sighs Obi-Wan. 

The droid departs soon after, leaving him alone with his thoughts. He considers applying the bacta patches to his neck, and ultimately decides not to. The bruises are ugly and uncomfortable, but the pain is strangely grounding. They will serve as an important reminder when Vader inevitably returns. Leaning back on the velvet chaise near the window, Obi-Wan gazes out at the teeming portrait of Naboo’s wilderness. Why was it so important to bring him here, of all places?

Obi-Wan doubts he’ll like the answer. His eyes flutter closed. 

_Three days._

He can do it. As long as Vader keeps away, he can. 

The sith will return, and Obi-Wan will reject him. Vehemently. Whatever his fears upon waking, he is willing to bet now that what remains of Anakin will not allow Vader to force himself on the one he once called master.

Bendeluum wisps through his mind, but Obi-Wan shoves it away. However much it frightens him, Vader made it clear he won’t let that happen -- if only out of some twisted sense of ownership. It’s a testament to his situation that he has to take comfort from that.

Obi-Wan makes himself comfortable on the chaise for a while, gaze fixed unseeingly on the ceiling. He thinks of Qui-Gon, and Anakin. Of Senator Amidala and her children. Of all the things he might’ve done to stop this nightmare from happening. He combs his memories, searching for the proverbial precipice -- the point of no return, when all was lost. 

Time drags and rockets, all at once.

He tracks the hours by the movement of the stars across the sky, and the worsening signs of his body’s betrayal. 

The feverish heat soon returns with a vengeance. His too-long hair sticks to his forehead, damp with sweat. Restless and uncomfortable, Obi-Wan thinks to meditate, but his once-effortless serenity eludes him. His mind is a spiral of chaos: grief and anger and humiliation and fear all war for dominance in his head. 

The wretched churn of unworthy emotions only adds to his simmering distress. Desperate for distraction, he tries to read some of the old books stored on the suite’s lone shelf, but he can’t seem to focus on the words. Eventually he hurls one viciously at the window. It doesn’t break, and yet the loud thump of impact pleases him, somewhat. 

Next he thinks to go through kata, but his limbs are stiff and clumsy with each movement. He feels like an ungainly padawan, and quickly gives up. 

His neck throbs. The moons and stars continue their trek across the sky. 

The med droid visits periodically, scanning him and asking after his needs, but Obi-Wan bats it away. He paces the room, trying to bleed the worsening tension from his body, his breath growing loud and ugly in his ears. He should be plotting -- putting this time to good use -- but his mind has become an increasingly tumultuous jumble with the passing hours, alternating between an eerie fog and blind, animal panic. 

Eventually he loses track of the stars. His blood is thrumming, fire. 

He orbits the bed. 

Obi-Wan is already soaked by the time he falls onto the sheets. A terrible groan sounds in his throat as he looks desperately for the remnants of that blessed scent. It’s there, but so faint; disappearing. He needs more _\--_

Still groaning, he curls in on himself. His thighs are taut and trembling, growing more soaked by the second. He is burning, burning. Gritting his teeth, he tears off the ruined shorts with clumsy hands, and a strangled gasp escapes him as he finally palms himself. He’s never been so hard in his life. 

Obi-Wan grinds desperately against his palm, but it’s not enough, not nearly enough. After a moment he gives in and strokes his cock once, twice, three times, moaning brokenly as he comes. Fresh slick seeps from his entrance while he lies there, shuddering.

The mad fire recedes a little from his skull, but he is not soothed. It will return. 

Obi-Wan’s eyes drift to the window. The sky has lightened to the sleepy blue of impending dawn. He gazes at it for a moment, before yanking the bedcovers up over his naked, trembling form. Darkness enfolds him, deep and lulling. Wrapped in it as well as the cloying sweetness of his own scent, his eyes fall shut. 

He does not sleep. 

* * *

By the time Vader returns to Naboo, nearly fourteen standard-hours after he last saw Obi-Wan, he is practically vibrating out of his skin. 

“How is he?” he immediately asks KW-3, Obi-Wan’s personal med droid. 

“Master Kenobi has entered _estrus,”_ KW-3 informs him, after a rote greeting. It follows alongside Vader as he stalks into the Lake Country estate that once belonged to his master, stormtroopers snapping to attention and saluting from their various posts. “Though his vitals are not yet life-threatening, his emotional and neurological status are both deteriorating rapidly. Recent attempts to assess him have been met with vehement rejection.”

“Rejection?” Vader echoes, glancing at the med droid with narrowed eyes. 

“He threatened to dismantle me, master.” 

“As if he could,” Vader scoffs. Entering the smaller terrace suite he’s requisitioned for himself, he sets about shedding his imperial garb for the simpler robes that have already been laid out. Next to the pile is a candlelit tray heaped with food and drink. Vader looks over it critically. “Has he been eating?”

“Very little, master.”

Vader ties the obi into place around his waist with a frown. Swiping at his freshly-washed curls, he gives himself a brief once-over in the bureau mirror, picks up the tray, and says, “I will go to him now. Spread the word that we are not to be disturbed for any reason.”

When the droid has intoned understanding, Vader sweeps out of the room. Despite KW-3’s dismaying report, he can’t quell the violent thrills of excitement in his abdomen as he climbs the tower where Obi-Wan waits. Every step brings him closer to the one that makes his blood sing, strange and fervid. 

Three agonizing months -- and now the time is nearly upon them. Vader can still hardly believe it. Clutching the dinner tray, he stops before the twin doors and takes a moment to collect himself. As much as he’s fantasized about this day, he’s not sure what to expect.

The humans of Naboo were always singular in their lack of a second gender, his lost wife included. The Jedi's suppression of his more primal nature made it a nonissue between them, and Vader knew contentment in their marriage -- but the fact remains that he has no experience with mating cycles, omegas, or what it means to claim a mate. For over a decade, he has lived as one without designation. 

Now, though. 

Now liquid fire sears his bones, his veins.

The doors slide open, flooding him with the scent of **_omega,_** and Vader thinks he’ll come apart with it. It is a concentrated effort not to stumble into the room, nose in the air, his mechno hand warping the tray as he scans his surroundings, lightheaded. 

_This,_ he thinks breathlessly, abandoning the tray on the nearby chaise. _This is something worse than passion._

“Obi-Wan?” Vader calls, the husky scrape of his own voice strange to his ears. The bed is empty but he draws towards it anyway, his cock growing unbearably heavy between his legs as he inhales the redolent scent imbued in the sheets. The musky sweetness nearly drives him mad, clouding in his skull as he looks for Obi-Wan. After a moment, he senses him in the closet near the fresher. Salivating, Vader goes to the door. 

It’s dark inside when he opens it, but enough light streams in to reveal Obi-Wan curled in the far corner, trembling. His smell is overwhelming in the enclosed space, and the door groans beneath Vader’s mechno hand as he fights the sudden, blinding instinct to drag him out and spread him open and have him right there on the carpet. 

His cock throbs desperately at the thought, precome leaking in his undergarments. It takes every last ounce of his self-control to slowly enter the shadowed space, and speak. “Obi-Wan,” he breathes. 

Obi-Wan only hunches further into his knees. He is naked. A fine sheen of sweet covers the pale skin of his arms and shoulders, and at some point he had the presence of mind to splay a towel under himself. It is soaked through now, along with his buttocks, his thighs. 

Vader releases a tremulous breath at the sight, the threads of his already-fragile control quickly fraying as he takes one step forward, and another. The galaxy has narrowed to Obi-Wan’s shuddering form, to the fire singing in his blood as Vader nears him, mouth parted. 

He is the son of the Force, the Chosen One. Soon he will be a god. But all of that rings empty when Obi-Wan raises his head, at last. 

His face is flushed and sweaty, his eyes wild. He glares at Vader with a ferocity the sith has never seen before, and Vader can only look back, stupefied. No one ever told him it would be like this, he thinks numbly, sinking to his knees a short distance away. Obi-Wan is rapture and ruin, divine. 

Vader bows his head in breathless worship. His hands curl atop his knees, desperate to touch. 

“What can I do?” he asks, hushed. 

_“Stay away,”_ Obi-Wan hisses, and it’s a blaster to the chest. Vader’s head snaps up in time to see Obi-Wan pressing back into the wall, _away_ from him. The imprint of Vader’s hand marks his throat in a ring of black. A surge of illness turns his stomach at the sight. 

“You’re suffering,” he rasps, breathing in that heady scent. Obi-Wan shifts warily, that viciousness still hardening his features. He is the most beautiful thing Vader has ever seen. 

He wants to pounce so badly, but he can’t. Obi-Wan must accept him first. The knowledge hums within him: inexplicable, but deep-rooted.

“Please,” he whispers, ducking his head once more. He is aching, burning, lost. “Let me...let me give you what you need.”

“I’d sooner die,” Obi-Wan snarls. 

He means it, and Vader freezes. Red swaths across his vision. 

“You don’t…” the words fall hoarse and clumsy from his lips, dying in his throat as devastation chokes his lungs -- howls cataclysmic in his skull. He thinks he’ll come apart with it, and in an instant he is looming over Obi-Wan, his heart beating an ugly, panicked tattoo. _“You don’t mean that.”_

Obi-Wan flinches, but doesn’t falter.

“Leave me be, Vader,” he gasps, eyes blazing beneath his red-gold fringe. His pupils are blown, his features carved into pained but resolute perfection. “I will not have you. Not now. Not ever.”

Each word punctures the frantic thing in Vader’s chest, and he shakes violently with the black impulse to tear at him -- to bite and thrash and _claim._

But no, he can’t, he _can’t --_

_(Obi-Wan would hate him)_

_“Please,”_ he begs, his own voice a tremulous wisp of sound the likes of which he’s never heard. In his stunned desolation, Vader dares to reach out and grasp Obi-Wan’s wrist with his flesh hand. The contact is enough to snap his frayed control at last; sinking forward, he cries, “Please, master, take it back, let me--”

The words die beneath an explosion of pain. 

Vader gasps, falling backwards from the perfect palm heel strike.

“I told you to _stay away,”_ Obi-Wan growls, watching as Vader scrambles to his feet, gloved hand pressed to his throbbing nose. Blood spills between his fingers — it’s probably broken. 

Obi-Wan doesn’t look regretful in the slightest, and rage surges white in Vader’s skull. In its throes, he screams, _“Fine! ”_

He stalks out of the closet, slamming the door behind him, and bellows at its panel, _“You can rot in here for all I care!”_

 _“I look forward to it!”_ comes Obi-Wan’s muffled reply. 

Dizzy with hurt and fury and the compulsion to throttle him, Vader flees the chamber.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i'm a busy student and shit is kind of hitting the fan in this last semester, but i'm super excited about this story and i plan to update it regularly. stay tuned!


	3. void and star

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this semester nearly ate me alive, y'all. i can see the light at the end of the tunnel but holy fuck 
> 
> anyway i'm sorry for the wait! on top of life events, this chapter was admittedly difficult to write as i figure out exactly where i want to take this story, but i hope it's okay nonetheless 
> 
> thanks so much for the support!

Seconds, minutes, hours, days: all cease to exist. There is nothing but the fire.

It savages his insides, sears him head-to-toe. He cannot breathe for it, cannot move or think beyond the _need_ boiling him alive. He strokes his cock and curls his fingers desperately into the wet heat that has become the center of his being, but it’s not enough, not what he needs -- like sprinkling water on an engine fire. The inferno worsens even as he comes, over and over.

He shakes and moans and sobs, but there’s no one to comfort him, no one to hear. He is abandoned, alone. Doomed to this abyss of want, forever.

There could be nothing worse.

_Please,_ he thinks -- or perhaps cries aloud -- clawing blindly at synthsilk sheets. He has vague snatches of awareness, enough to tell that he is on the bed, back arched, fingers buried deep inside himself, but the knowledge sinks away just as quickly in a bright wave of fever. _Please._

_Make it stop._

Occasionally, blue light burns against the darkness of his eyelids, and something cold and hard will nudge at him. Obi-Wan is too lost to bat it away. Over the loud gasps of his own breathing he makes out a tinny, clinical voice talking at him, but the words smear in and out of his awareness, like everything else.

His chest is heaving, thighs trembling. Warmth slides down his flesh.

Even sleep offers no respite. In his muddled nightmares he watches the light fade from his master’s eyes; sees Senator Amidala, rearing back in pale denial; pleads with Anakin, to no avail. In his nightmares Obi-Wan cuts him down -- leaves his beloved maimed and burning on the fiery shores of Mustafar.

_**I HATE YOU,**_ Vader screams at him, consumed by fire. It is a terrible sight, one that ingrains itself into his soul, and Obi-Wan weeps bitterly in the void between dream and reality.

_I failed you._ The thought is almost clear in the sinister heat pervading his mind, his body. _I’m sorry._

Desperately he tries to surface from the wretched nightmares, but it’s like swimming through bacta. He comes up only for a moment before sinking down again to the abyss.

In one of these moments, Obi-Wan registers the cold thing gripping his jaw. Something pushes against his cracked lips; he chokes on the water as it filters down his throat. Coughing violently, he wrenches his head away and leans over in time to retch over the side of the bed.

“- dire need of fluids, sir,” the tinny voice is saying. There is a loud whirring right by his ear, and with a groan Obi-Wan rolls away from it. He curls into himself, trembling, his eyes squeezed shut. His throat is so dry. His head pounds with blinding agony.

_Make it stop,_ he thinks, a sob building in his chest. _Please, make it stop._

“I will alert Lord Vader of your condition,” the tinny voice says, but the words mean nothing to Obi-Wan. He buries his face in the sheets, and is lost in another wave of fire.

* * *

He is standing on the crest of a great dune, peering up at infinity.

Obi-Wan studies the sea of innumerable stars, something like peace settling over him. Around him, the desert stretches pale and glittering with the light of three moons. Obi-Wan knows them -- has been here, before. He doesn’t know how or when, but is nonetheless sure of it.

“They have names, you know,” someone says in his ear. Obi-Wan’s eyes fall briefly closed as that warm firewood scent envelops him, submerging him down to his bones. Two strong, familiar arms wind around his waist, pulling him back into a firm chest. He falls easily -- eagerly -- into the embrace, and some distant part of him wonders if things between them could have ever been as simple as this.

_“Ghomrassen,”_ Anakin recites, his voice reverberating strangely off of the sand. _“Guermessa,_ and _Chenini.”_

His touch and scent and voice surround Obi-Wan, as infinite as the sand and sky. He is both and neither, void and star. To behold him is annihilation.

Trembling, Obi-Wan covers Anakin’s hands with his own, melting back against his chest the way he’s yearned to for so long. The moment hangs weightless, euphoric, and to his astonishment there is no guilt or fear or shame. Instead it feels inevitable -- _right_ \-- too perfect to be real.

_What is this?_ he wonders, eyes lifting again to the endless stretch of sky. It feels like a dream, but it isn’t.

“No,” Anakin agrees, that odd echo underlying the words. His stare is a physical brand on the side of Obi-Wan’s face. “You aren’t dreaming, Master.”

Obi-Wan’s heart thuds in the cage of his ribs, in the sand beneath his boots, in the chest against his back. In the sudden storm of questions that fill his head, one surges to his tongue above the rest. “Then you’re truly here with me?”

“I am always with you,” Anakin says softly, and Obi-Wan does not look back, because to do so is _annihilation._ He is as sure of it as he has ever been sure of anything. Breathless, he keeps his gaze on the glowing stars instead, hands tightening over Anakin’s.

_Strange,_ he thinks distantly. Some of them are winking out.

For a moment the desert wavers around him: Obi-Wan surfaces, gasping, into fire and thirst and blinding agony beating in his skull like drums. The world flashes white across his vision. He hears frantic beeping and tinny voices and the sharp crunch of ravaged metal, followed by a howl of rage --

**_“You will bring him back to me!”_ **

\-- before he is again submerged into the oceanic stretch of sand and night.

He jolts, breathing hard, and tries to break out of Anakin’s grip, but Anakin won’t let go. He lowers them onto the sand instead, until Obi-Wan is slumped against his chest.

“I’m dying,” Obi-Wan says, gaze lifting from his lap to where the stars are vanishing in long clusters, leaving great swaths of darkness across the sky. Anakin is still pressed to his back, chin hooked over his shoulder, staring a hole into the side of his face.

“Yes,” he murmurs, arms tightening around Obi-Wan’s body. A cold wind stirs the desert suddenly, howling across the sand as he says, “Because you would not have me.”

Mesmerized by the growing void above, Obi-Wan whispers back, “You are lost, Anakin. Consumed by Darth Vader. It is him I turned away.”

_Not you,_ he thinks, but will not say. _Never you._

“I am _here,”_ Anakin grumbles against the curve of his jaw, with a petulance reminiscent of his padawan days. “You only have to look.”

And Obi-Wan almost does -- almost turns to him. He stops short, however, fingers clawing at the cool sand, his heart thrumming somewhere deep beneath the innumerable grains as he looks back to the sky, torn. What will happen when all the stars go out?

“You know,” Anakin accuses, that sullen note still coloring his voice, and Obi-Wan does.

The sky is darkening. Soon it will be dead. He doesn’t want to watch, but cannot look away.

“Master.” There is a soft plea in the old title that pierces Obi-Wan’s chest. Tearing his gaze from the impending darkness, Obi-Wan turns his head slightly until Anakin’s nose is brushing his cheekbone. He glimpses waves of golden-brown hair in his peripheral vision, and the sense that he is tottering on the edge of a precipice falls over him in a great, crushing tide.

“I’m here,” Anakin repeats, intimate as the blood warming his veins. Obi-Wan's eyes fall closed. The wind gusts all around them now, howling in his bones. When the stars have gone and darkness falls, it will remain, he knows. 

“I need you, now,” Anakin whispers. “Will you go?”

He sounds so afraid.

As the last stars wink out and the three moons are swallowed, Obi-Wan makes his decision. He turns in Anakin’s embrace, and beholds him at last.

Just as he suspected, it is annihilation.

Anakin gazes back at him, eyes wide and blue and shining, and Obi-Wan loves him above all things.

He cups that beloved face in his hands, overwhelmed with it, and can spare no more fear for the darkness closing in around them as Anakin surges over him, almighty.

He is warmth and need and love, his passion tangible as he presses Obi-Wan backwards, lips attaching hungrily to his jaw, his throat, his collarbone. _I love you_ , Anakin promises, one hand gripping the hair at the back of his head. Those soft lips claim his own at last, and it is euphoria.

Obi-Wan surges up into the kiss, clawing desperately at that lithe body as it drapes over his, solid and inevitable and _right._

Then --

_[ he surfaces again into thirst and agony, holy fire._

_“No,” someone is whispering, over and over. He is being carried; arms crush him to a heaving chest._

_He feels a flash of nausea as he is lowered onto a plush bed, soft sheets._

_A warm, solid weight curls immediately around him, pressing flush to his back. He shudders violently in the embrace, drowning in that firewood scent as it rolls over him: a rich, cloying tidal wave of fear and lust and rage._

_“It’s alright,” the voice says in his ear, low and fervid, frantic. “I’m here. I’m here. I’ll take care of you, I promise.”]_

The rest of the voice’s half-mad murmurings smear away as Anakin pulls him back under, tearing at his clothes. Obi-Wan welcomes it, heat lashing in his veins at the triumph in Anakin's eyes when he lies naked beneath him, at last.

_You are mine,_ Anakin says. His voice is thunder and lightning, divine. Obi-Wan submits to it, his legs falling open without thought, and Anakin settles between them as if he were made to be there; his free hand grips Obi-Wan’s knee, forcing them wider still.

_Stay with me,_ he whispers, as Obi-Wan’s thighs tremble around him.

_Yes,_ Obi-Wan breathes, relaxing into the darkness that cups them both. He knows he has nothing to fear as he looks up into Anakin’s eyes. _Always._

Anakin’s joy is abrupt, calamitous. It besets Obi-Wan from all sides, bursting in his skull like fireworks -- leaves him dazed and blind as Anakin’s teeth graze the sacred place between his neck and shoulder. The void around them shudders briefly into somethingness, so great is his delight.

_[Arms wrapped too tightly around him._

_Loud, gasping breaths against his neck._

_A heart thudding messily against his back._

_It’s too much, not enough; he grinds back against the wall of heat behind him, moaning, and is rewarded with a choked gasp._

_**“Obi-Wan.”** The low growl is edged with something fragile, reverberating throughout his entire body._

_Obi-Wan shudders, and is quickly lost to delirious joy as his alpha ruts back against him at last, hands locking around his hips in a brutal grip._

_He wriggles his backside desperately in an attempt to meet each thrust, feeling that hardness and sobbing at the promise of it._

_“Please,” he finally manages to beg. The word is hoarse and wretched, barely audible. “Just --”_

_Madly, he reaches behind him for the source of the firewood scent -- his salvation -- but his wrist is quickly snared in a vice-like grip and pinned back to the bed._

_“Please,” he moans, and is vaguely aware of an answering sob against his neck.]_

(It’s only a dream.)

He sinks gladly back to darkness -- to Anakin, burning at the center of it. He looms over Obi-Wan like the sun itself, inexorable and radiant. Divine.

**_Mine,_ **Anakin whispers, howls, sings. He is an inferno, an abyss.

Obi-Wan beholds him, and falls.

_Yes,_ he cries-laughs-screams.

There is no more fear, nor guilt, nor shame. Only perfect euphoria as Anakin lines himself up against Obi-Wan’s opening, and pushes into him with one smooth roll of his hips. Obi-Wan cries out, grabbing blindly at him, his mind subsiding to white static as he's filled at last.

Anakin settles inside him with a long, shuddering breath, and there is nothing but his scent and the hot slide of his flesh and the thick weight of his cock splitting Obi-Wan open.

His mouth stretched in a silent scream, Obi-Wan briefly leaves his body. He throws his head back, keening, and Anakin’s hand tightens viciously in his hair. Those pale eyes watch him, hooded and burning, as he pulls out and gives another deep thrust. It strikes something deep in Obi-Wan -- makes his breath hitch and his hands claw and his legs tremble as they wrap around Anakin’s hips.

_See, Master?_ Anakin says, gasping. He begins to move in earnest, that triumph blazing in his eyes. _We fit so perfectly._

_Yes,_ Obi-Wan can only think. He is _full_ at last, and it’s so much better than he could ever have imagined, so much _more._ The delicious stretch of Anakin inside him is enough to test his sanity; Obi-Wan claws at him, each thrust driving him further into white delirium, and submits to it: the knowledge that he was made for this.

There is no light or darkness, no Code, no duty. Anakin pins his wrists, fucking into him mercilessly, and on his cock Obi-Wan unravels.

_I love you._ He’s not sure who says it, but the words reverberate around them, a litany of madness. _I love you, I love you._

Anakin is within and above and around him, and they are not two, but one.

_Stay with me,_ Anakin whispers, his head sinking to the crook of Obi-Wan’s neck.

_Yes!_ Obi-Wan sobs, undone. He is drowning, soaring --

_(lost)_

He laughs, overjoyed, and is neither surprised nor afraid when teeth sink into his flesh, sealing this.

Obi-Wan arches into the bite with a shout, his vision whiting out in a tidal wave of pleasure and euphoria and **_fire_**

* * *

The Force.

It winds around and within him, blessedly cool. Peace and rapture, friend and haven, it murmurs in the pockets of his mind. Warns him something is wrong.

Surfacing slowly into consciousness, Obi-Wan opens himself to it, and becomes aware of an anomaly burning at the center of himself. When he grasps at the aberration, disoriented, he is met with a most unpleasant surprise.

There is...a chain of fire, rooted in the depths of his being. A **_bond_** , tethering his soul to another’s. Alarm catapults Obi-Wan into full consciousness. He tries to move, but his limbs are wooden. The slosh of water startles him. He becomes aware of a terrible pain in the place where his neck meets his shoulder.

“Shh,” Vader says. Obi-Wan jolts, his eyes flying open as damp fingers brush against his cheek. His vision swimming, he recoils from the touch.

Irritation laced with hurt surges suddenly within him. The bond, he realizes, frightened. Its strength is unprecedented, terrifying.

He can hardly differentiate the emotions from his own -- can’t shake the sudden sense that he is not alone within himself. His mental shields, so painstakingly erected over the years, have been blown to smithereens.

His neck is _throbbing._

If the training bonds he shared before were torches, flickering at the edges of his consciousness, then this new tether is a pyre, great and burning at the plaza of his soul.

His vision settling at last, Obi-Wan’s jaw clenches at the sight of Vader drawing back from him, water rippling around his naked waist. A sonic bath, he registers distantly, forcing himself to sit up a little on the built-in bench.

Steam rises from the water’s surface to cloud the fresher: an inordinately spacious chamber fitted with a turboshower in addition to the bath. A row of mirror panes make up the wall to his left. Obi-Wan locks eyes with himself in the glass. The one who looks back remains a stranger, haggard and pale.

His attention zeroes in on the black and purple splotch at the base of his neck, and his heart stops. The rest of the pieces slot into place.

In his peripheral vision Vader goes equally still, gaze burning a hole in the side of his face as Obi-Wan raises a slow, trembling hand to the mark on his neck. It gives another vicious throb, and he can feel a tidal wave of _something_ rising in the back of his mind as he looks at it, black and cold.

Vader flinches, an equal burst of emotion ricocheting in Obi-Wan’s skull. It is a tangled cluster of guilt and hurt and rage and panic, bombarding him in its invasiveness as he turns to meet Vader’s stare.

“What have you done?” Obi-Wan demands, voice flat and cold. He already knows, but he needs to hear it. Needs Vader to confess.

Vader’s throat bobs. He grips the cloth he was using to clean Obi-Wan, knuckles white. His eyes are molten, searing, and as Obi-Wan looks into them the bond pulses. In his head swell little whispers, edged with that tumult of emotion.

_\-- will hate me_

_it was necessary --_

_\-- my Omega, **mine**_

“You were dying,” Vader murmurs. His voice is steady, despite the storm raging at the other end of the bond. Unblinking, he goes on, “I did what I had to.”

“What you wanted, you mean,” Obi-Wan accuses, but the instant the words leave his mouth he knows it isn’t true. Vader’s jaw clenches with outrage, his chin lowering as he glares at Obi-Wan, who is suddenly bombarded with it: the truth.

It blooms within his mind: Vader, his anger supplanted by anxiety as he follows the med droid back to his chamber, and immediately panics at the sight of Obi-Wan, gaunt and dehydrated and dangerously overheated. Dead to the world.

Obi-Wan frowns at the burst of information, and Vader says, “I rushed you to my ship, thinking the team of med droids here could do something, but...”

They couldn’t, Obi-Wan realizes. And Vader destroyed them for their failure.

**_“You will bring him back to me!”_ **

The memory of that thunderous, cracking voice doesn’t come from the bond, but Obi-Wan himself. He pauses, his frown deepening. How -- ?

_sand and night and endless stars_

_a voice in his ear, familiar_

_Oh,_ thinks Obi-Wan, as the memories begin to burgeon in his mind.

_Ghomrassen, Guermessa, Chenini._

Three moons casting light onto endless dunes. A howling wind. Long swaths of stars, wiped out.

A few feet away, Vader’s eyes widen, and Obi-Wan immediately attempts to shield the memories as best he can. But the bond is so powerful, his own emotions overwhelming as he remembers it all.

_Anakin, Anakin -- !_

He was there, he was _real._ Obi-Wan trembles at the knowledge, at the searing flood of memories -- Anakin moving against him, _inside him,_ hands locked around his wrists as he devoured him alive. In his arms, Obi-Wan made a choice. His palm pressing into the mark, he silently acknowledges the consequence.

_I need you, now,_ Anakin told him, in that strange unreality which was nonetheless real. _I’m here._

Obi-Wan closes his eyes. Grasps again at the bond.

_You only have to look,_ Anakin implored. So Obi-Wan does. He pulls on the tether, and _looks_.

Anakin’s soul rages parallel to his, steeped in storm and darkness. It is warped almost beyond recognition, and Obi-Wan’s first instinct is to recoil -- to weep in despair at the mutilation of what should have been familiar.

The memory of Anakin gives him courage, however. Steeling himself, Obi-Wan looks harder; allows himself to be swept in the storm. At first he feels only darkness, a miasma of greed and wrath and pride distorting memories and bonds and all that once made up Anakin Skywalker. The depth of it makes him sick.

But Obi-Wan keeps looking, clinging to the knowledge that what he’s looking for must be there. And eventually, his faith is rewarded. Buried deep in the ruin of Anakin’s soul -- at what must be the eye of the storm -- is a pocket of light, glowing faintly.

Distantly Obi-Wan feels hands locking around his biceps -- a voice sharpening above him -- but he shuts it out, too focused on that tiny flicker of _Anakin,_ calling to him. The bond is rooted there, he realizes.

Obi-Wan seizes the bond in a death grip, then, their connection flooding open as he closes in on the remnant Vader’s worked so hard to bury.

He’s almost grasped it, when he’s thrown abruptly back into the physical world. Vader is shaking him so hard his teeth rattle, nostrils flared, eyes wild.

_“I said **stop.”**_

Obi-Wan blinks up at him, dazed.

“The bond,” he croaks, breathing in Anakin’s scent. _Alpha,_ his hindbrain sings. _ **Mate.**_ Electricity crackles down his spine. “It’s incomplete, isn’t it?”

Vader’s grip loosens on his biceps. He glares down at Obi-Wan, his jaw ticking. Water beads on his lashes, drips from his curls. His eyes are murky gold, but Obi-Wan looks into them unflinching. For the first time since he woke to this new reality, he is serene.

Darth Vader stands above him, the picture of menace. But Anakin lives in him, still.

_Not lost,_ Obi-Wan thinks, remembering how he burned in the darkness, a living star. _Not yet._

“You didn’t consummate it,” he whispers, head tipping back to better look into those eyes. The mark throbs so awfully on his neck. “Why?”

He knows the answer, and so is startled when Vader sneers, “What fun would that have been?”

Leaning down, he grips the edge of the bath on either side of Obi-Wan, effectively caging him in as he continues in a foul whisper, “You should have seen yourself, Obi-Wan. Such a senseless, moaning thing. You’d have spread your legs for anyone who happened by.”

Obi-Wan presses back against the wall of the bath, his jaw clenching hard enough to crack. The bond seethes between them; he knows Vader can feel his humiliation -- his betrayal -- but that hard expression doesn’t falter when Vader says, with dark glee, “No. When you take my knot, I’ll make sure you remember every second of it. That you know who you belong to…”

Vader moves as if to touch his mark, but Obi-Wan slaps his hand away. Rising from the bench, he sways unsteadily in the water for a moment, gritting his teeth against a wave of nausea. He’s still weak -- still far from the General who confronted Anakin on Mustafar -- but the Force is with him, humming in his bones. Its dear presence imbues Obi-wan with a strength he’s sorely missed as he holds Vader’s gaze.

“You’re not fooling me, Anakin,” he says, taking petty pleasure in the way Vader flinches back from him, nostrils flaring in a dark scowl. “That’s not why you refrained, and we both know it.”

The bond flares in testament to his words, echoes of Obi-Wan’s vehement rejection ringing loudly between them. Vader’s burgeoning fury only confirms what Obi-Wan already knew, and he can't help the vindication that seethes within him. Anakin is not only alive somewhere in Vader -- but strong enough to have curbed his alpha nature in a situation where it should have been impossible.

The knowledge fills Obi-Wan with such love and compassion in that moment, it nearly drowns out the anger storming the other end of the bond.

“I told you not to call me that,” Vader grits, hands curling and uncurling at his sides. Understanding it for the warning that it is, Obi-Wan remains silent as Vader goes on furiously, “Anakin Skywalker was _weak._ Now I am all there is.”

A surge of red conviction swarms their connection, drowning Obi-Wan’s love in a flood of fresh foreboding as Vader grips his wrist and promises, “I’ll show you.”

Before Obi-Wan can learn what that entails, there is a curt knock on the door to the refresher. Both of their heads whip in the direction of the sound, Vader’s fingers tightening briefly around him.

“What is it?” he growls after a moment.

The door slides open to reveal a man in a drab gray, unfamiliar uniform Obi-Wan assumes is representative of the new Empire. The man’s features remain utterly neutral as he steps into the chamber and bows sharply, hands folded behind his back.

“Lord Vader,” he intones. “We arrive on Coruscant in exactly thirty minutes. The Emperor requires your immediate presence."

“We’ll be there,” Vader replies, that bite in his words. “Now _leave us.”_

Obi-Wan senses a pulse of anxiety from the man as he bows again, and promptly vanishes.

_“...’We?’”_ Obi-Wan says into the silence. “Have you brought me to swear fealty to your new Emperor, then?”

Vader glares down at him for several seconds, before releasing him abruptly. He climbs from the bath, and Obi-Wan finds himself unable to avert his gaze from the gleaming lines of Anakin’s body, lithe and lovely as ever. He remembers with another flash of heat how that body draped over his, all-consuming, and has to take a steadying breath, one wet hand running down his face. That mad fire from before has faded, but its embers seem to burn within him still.

Vader glances at him sharply as he gathers their towels, and in a flare of panic Obi-Wan gets out as well, hoping to distract from any line of questioning. He doesn’t think Vader’s aware of his rendezvous with Anakin in that realm between dream and reality, and something tells him it must stay that way. The Force, perhaps.

It murmurs at his temples as he catches the towel tossed to him. Though traces of suspicion still curl at his end of the bond, Vader seems to have been sufficiently distracted for the time being. Obi-Wan has to repress a shiver as those eyes flick down his body and up again, a familiar heat filling them.

Drying his curls, Vader murmurs, “The creation of the bond has sated the worst of your heat, for now. But there’s no telling for how long.”

“What are you implying?” Obi-Wan asks, wary.

“You don’t need to go through that again, Obi-Wan,” Vader insists, his voice softening to sultry velvet. Goosebumps pebble all along Obi-Wan’s flesh as Vader closes the distance between them again, hands fluttering over his naked waist.

Obi-Wan remains stone-still, his entire focus narrowed to the space between their bodies as Vader grips his waist and leans forward, scenting him. A pleased rumble starts in his chest, and Obi-Wan has to fight the compulsion to press against him and breathe his scent in turn. It’s so much harder than he ever imagined.

His breath hitches as Vader whispers in his ear, “Say the word, and I’ll fill you up.”

_Yes,_ whisper the embers still burning within him. _Please._

Whatever retort he might dredge up is thwarted by the bitter dryness of his throat, however. His face is burning.

That awful heat curls heavy in his stomach as Vader draws back, hands lingering on him. The faintest smirk plays on his lips.

Obi-Wan meets his gaze, and knows that hard times are ahead.

_There's nothing for it,_ he tells himself, stepping out of Vader's grasp. Whatever happens -- he'll do what he must. 

To destroy Vader, whatever that entails. To survive. 

Releasing the ugly current of his emotions to the Force, Obi-Wan sets about getting dressed. Now that the worst of his heat has passed and he mostly has his wits about him, he needs to gather more information. To plan. 

But first, the Emperor. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm gonna do my best to have the next chapter out as soon as possible!
> 
> i welcome you to harass my procrastinating ass [here](https://andbonesgnawedbyteeth.tumblr.com/)
> 
> thanks so much for reading!


	4. odium

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (insertsuprisebitchgif) i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me! 
> 
> Sorry for the wait, y'all! I finished school, passed my boards, and am about to start my first Big Girl Job, but fear not: this has officially become my emotional support fic. I'm excited about what I have planned and I hope you guys are, too
> 
> Thanks so much for all the lovely comments, and the well wishes in school! I hope the new year has nothing but great things in store for all of you!

In the bowels of the Imperial Palace, before the great doors leading into the throne room, Vader appraises his mate.

Ignoring the watchful gazes of the Royal Guards nearby, he brushes away a stray lock of Obi-Wan’s hair and says through the bond, _You will behave._

Obi-Wan only stares at him, stone- faced. Vader can feel his rage, however: how it sears within him, black and cold and of a depth that makes Vader’s heart race, his mouth dry. 

While he expected Obi-Wan to be upset upon arriving here in the former Jedi stronghold, he could not have imagined this howling fury from the man he once called _master._ It has only grown stronger -- _wilder_ \-- since they made their way through the Palace, the bond convulsing with red static as Obi-Wan’s eyes tracked the bustle of worker droids and Imperial renevators building and destroying, tearing down the great bronzium statues of long-dead Jedi. 

A strange hollow feeling gnawed at Vader’s chest as they walked through the once-familiar halls together, silent.

Bombarded by the storm of Obi-Wan’s emotions -- _betrayalsorrow_ **_rage_ ** _\--_ he is struck again with the unpleasant feeling, and smooths his hands down the fine dark fabric of Obi-Wan’s coat while he centers himself. 

It looks lovely on him, with its tapered waist and flowing sleeves. _Beautiful,_ Vader thinks, breathless. 

Obi-Wan was always striking, always hard to look away from -- but he finds it impossible to do so now, when his once-unreachable master stands before him in the throes of fury, hard-eyed and radiant and _his._

Studying Obi-Wan’s stone mask, he wishes he could swallow that fury for himself, keep it close to his heart.

 _You will behave,_ he says again, impressing his will more forcefully through the storm howling at the other end of the bond. As rapturous as it is, his master won’t take such ill will lightly. 

A muscle flutters in Obi-Wan’s jaw at the silent command. Vader feels his lashing anger -- his mute defiance -- and as he breathes in that heady scent he is nearly overcome with the urge to _pounce_ ; to bear Obi-Wan down onto the marble floor and fuck him open for his insolence.

In time, he tells himself, though the alpha in him howls and howls. It will get what it wants, Vader assures it. Eventually. 

Obi-Wan tenses beneath his hands, having sensed the nature of his thoughts. Vader gathers him close, ignoring the stiffness of his body as he leans down, murmuring, “Remember what’s at stake.”

Obi-Wan freezes against him, a pulse of fear interrupting the red static swarming his end of the bond. He indeed remembers Vader’s earlier warning of Bendeluum, and Vader can feel his emotions rise in a great loud gale -- before quieting abruptly.

When Vader leans back to look at him, it’s to find any lingering trace of tension gone from Obi-Wan’s face. Now he wears the smooth, mild mask of the Negotiator, his distress drowned to the furthest reaches of himself, beyond even Vader’s reach.

It’s infuriating. Astounding. 

Truly he is looking at the incarnation of the Jedi’s dogma -- their blasted Code that lauds the death of passion. Vader glowers at him, wanting suddenly to tear past the facade, to seize the bond and force that storm of emotion back to the surface, where it belongs. 

But they’ve lingered enough as it is. 

Swallowing his irritation, Vader nods at the guards and lays his hand on the small of Obi-Wan’s back as the great doors open. His master’s regard envelops him instantly: a frigid, abstract caress that lifts the hairs on the back of his neck as they glide towards the simple throne at the end of the room. 

The Emperor watches them approach with an interest that immediately sets off alarms in Vader’s head. He keeps his face blank and his thoughts clear however, focusing instead on the sweet scent wafting from his mate. Though sharpened with Obi-Wan’s anger, it is calming. 

The bond flares with another burst of red static as they stop before his master, though Obi-Wan’s veneer of indifference remains almost flawless. Only the sharp glint of his eyes give him away as they sweep over the Emperor. 

And Vader feels it -- the exact instant Obi-Wan falls to audacity. 

“Chancellor Palpatine,” he says lightly, looking the Emperor up and down with chilly contempt. “You’re looking positively _wretched._ Is the Dark Side always so cruel to its ilk?”

Cold fear constricts his chest before Vader can stomp it down; whipping to Obi-Wan, he sinks behind the veil of anger instead, lets it swarm his head as he seizes Obi-Wan by the back of his neck and forces him down onto his knees.

 _“Insolent fool,”_ he hisses, mechno hand snarling viciously in that tawny hair. “You will address your Emperor with the proper respect or I will have your tongue cut out.”

He doesn’t know if he means it or not -- only that a mute, resentful Obi-Wan is better than a dead one. 

Obi-Wan says nothing, but the bond convulses again with that angry static, this time directed solely at Vader. It takes everything he has to remain still and unfazed at the hiss of it, though instinct screams at him to kneel and touch and beg forgiveness. 

_I am saving you!_ he whispers through the bond. A fresh burst of static is Obi-Wan’s only response.

“Now, now, Lord Vader.” The Emperor’s voice is mild, his features creased in faint amusement while he regards them, and Vader thinks that’s worse. “General Kenobi has already lost so much.”

His golden eyes bore into Obi-Wan, unblinking. “Yes,” he murmurs. “I sense your anger, your sorrow. Your _hatred._ Most unworthy of a Jedi. _”_

Obi-Wan only stares back at him, stone-faced, and the Emperor bares his teeth in that ugly, hissing laughter. “Do you hate me, Kenobi?” he cackles. “Do you seek _revenge?”_

“Of course not, master,” Vader speaks up, panic simmering at his temples, for even as he denies it the bond convulses with Obi-Wan’s rage, a great red wave that threatens to drown them both. The Emperor’s cackling ceases as the Imperial banners hung throughout the throne room begin to sway in a nonexistent breeze. 

His hand tightening warningly in Obi-Wan’s hair, Vader goes on, “I assure you, Kenobi will prove an invaluable asset to the Empire. He only needs time to adjust -- ”

“You have squandered the time that was granted,” the Emperor snaps, amusement vanishing from his features abruptly. “I see nothing but a traitorous Jedi, one whose connection to the Force has been restored.”

 _It was the only way to save him,_ Vader nearly argues, but the words die in his throat at the cold flare of his master’s presence -- the sudden chill in his voice when he says, “Astounding. The Dark Side promises you unlimited power, and already you show weakness where the Jedi is concerned.” 

Vader forces himself to remain calm and still, though his nostrils flare and his free hand clenches as his master continues, “I am told of the havoc you caused aboard your ship on Kenobi’s behalf. While you slavered over him like a mad beast, several fugitive Jedi escaped arrest on Murkhana. _”_

The Emperor’s displeasure whips over him then, a storm of needles that prick him head to toe, burrowing in his deepest places. It’s awful, so _awful --_

_Anakin,_ he hears, but the whisper is quickly lost in the sudden chaos of his mind as he braces against the Emperor’s menace. 

“Do you suppose your blunder served the Empire?” the Emperor demands, and beneath his reproach Vader is a mote of dust. 

Overcome with the knowledge, he steps away from the Jedi, towards his master. His master, who has made him all he is. Before him, Vader sinks to his knees. 

“No, master,” he breathes out, bowing low. The needles _prick and prick_ at him, and beneath their bite he understands the error of his ways -- how foolish and _ungrateful_ he is, to have displeased his master so. “I - I lost control of myself. I am weak. Please, forgive me.”

The Emperor makes a scoffing sound that strikes him like a blow.

“Yes, you are weak,” he says, with enough icy derision to make Vader flinch. “And what has that weakness cost you?”

 _Padmé_ _,_ Vader remembers. The throne room dissolves around him.

He is breathing in the wretched fumes of Mustafar and she is backing away from him and he can _feel it, feel_ her grief and horror and the bright glow of her love collapsing like so many stars -- 

And he is fear incarnate, rage incarnate. He has done all this for **_her,_ ** slain _children_ so that theirs might live, he can’t lose her, _she is everything_

**_she is everything and she has BETRAYED HIM_ **

_Anakin,_ she chokes, hands clutching at her throat, but he dies that moment, when he looks into her eyes and understands that what is done cannot be undone. 

_Anakin!_ It is the one who turned her against him, calling from somewhere within. _Get up!_

Shuddering, Vader lifts his head. He is in the throne room of the Imperial Palace on Coruscant. Padmé and his children are dead. 

Darkness pushes at his temples, howls in his skull. Vader lifts his head to see its incarnation standing over him, unblinking. 

“My dear apprentice,” the Emperor croons. One cold white hand cups Vader’s cheek almost tenderly, though there is nothing soft in the way his master regards him. “Have I not promised you? All that you’ve lost will be regained and more, once you have given yourself _fully_ to the Dark Side.”

 _“Get away from him,”_ comes a snarl from behind him, and it’s like surfacing from an abyss. The needles pricking at his insides are usurped at once by boiling fury; Vader looks to see Obi-Wan on his feet, hands clenched dangerously at his sides as he fixes the Emperor with a death glare. 

Vader recognizes his stance, the thrumming tension in his body. A weapon poised to strike. 

_No,_ he thinks, but cannot move. 

_“Abomination,”_ Obi-Wan spits, ignoring the members of the royal guard as they rouse from their positions throughout the throne room, circling into formation around him. “Padmé and her children are dead because of your lies.”

Then he’s looking at Vader, that anguish twisting his features, and the hollow feeling returns in Vader’s chest as Obi-Wan demands, “Can you not see that, Anakin? This Dark Lord and his worthless promises have cost you _everything._ He manipulates you with every word!”

The Emperor grips his jaw, forcing Vader’s attention back to him. 

“See?” he whispers, sibilant, and the royal guards close in as if on cue, surrounding Obi-Wan. “Your attachment to this omega already threatens our goals.”

Vader tries to look at Obi-Wan again, but the Emperor’s hand is steel, immovable and cold. “He cannot be turned, and so must be dealt with.”

“No,” Vader croaks, though he knows Sidious is right. Still -- _still --_

He clutches at his master’s robes, needing him to understand, but his master isn’t listening anymore. The Emperor raises his other hand in silent command, and the royal guards snap at once towards Obi-Wan, who is too weakened to do anything but struggle fruitlessly as they seize his arms and force him back onto his knees. 

Animal rage explodes in Vader’s head at the sight.

They are _assailing his mate_ with their **_filthy hands,_ ** touching what is **_his!_ **He will crush their skulls for the transgression, stomp their innards to pulp --

 _“Lord Vader,”_ he hears vaguely, over the roar in his ears. Vader tears his bulging eyes from the royal guards to find the Emperor looking up at him, one icy hand gripping his arm. “Compose yourself.”

Red pulses across Vader’s vision; for one searing instant he intends to wrap the fingers of his mechno hand around that pallid neck and _crush._

But even through the haze of bloodlust he knows that would only make things worse, and chokes instead, “He’s _mine.”_

The Emperor gazes at him intently, some conclusion darkening his amber eyes, but Vader is already slipping away from him, succumbing to pure instinct. Tearing away from his master, his vision tunnels on Obi-Wan and the guards _touching him_ \--

The royal guards shift again as Vader draws his saber, not that it matters. Out of millions of soldiers they are the best of the best -- and Vader will destroy them regardless, see them punished for their sin. 

_No!_ Obi-Wan’s voice is faint, almost unintelligible, in the storm of rage besetting him. _Anakin, don’t!_

But Obi-Wan’s distress only makes him angrier, and without further ado Vader descends on the nearest guard holding his mate. The guard tenses, but he has no chance; the Force is one with Vader, humming in his bones as he beheads the scum with a lightning-quick slash of his arm. The first guard’s body hasn’t fallen before he’s striking at the second, who has enough sense to release Obi-Wan and put up some semblance of a fight, before Vader makes short work of him, too. 

He feels invincible -- _almighty_ \-- when the scum falls dead and he is able to gather Obi-Wan up into the safety of his arms. There are at least six more royal guards standing around him, poised to strike should Sidious will it, but they are nothing to Vader. He will kill them too -- **_kill them all_ **\-- if they so wish.

The Force sings with his conviction, swelling in his chest and the backs of his eyes. Drunk with it, Vader nuzzles into Obi-Wan’s neck, drowning in the bliss of his mate’s scent. It’s like sinking into a soft warm bed, and as the bond flares between them he is overcome with the desire to lay him down and make them one. 

He can feel Obi-Wan’s distress, however, his fear and sorrow; holding him tightly, Vader sends back a flood of protectiveness and adoration, hoping to wash away the turbulent feelings. 

_It’s alright,_ he murmurs -- and the Force is with him, shivering in validation of each word. _I’ll protect you, master._

Against his neck, Obi-Wan’s breath hitches. He begins to relax in Vader’s arms, ever so slightly.

“Leave us.” The Emperor’s voice pierces through his haze of instinct. Vader lifts his head, blinking, to see the royal guards obey at once, filing out of the throne room with stiff backs. 

When he finally looks to Sidious, it is to find the Emperor returning to his throne, unhurried. Once reseated, he regards Vader with an unreadable expression that makes the hairs lift on the back of Vader’s neck. 

He understands dimly that he has succumbed to a kind of madness, but can summon no regret; not when Obi-Wan stands pressed against him, strangely quiet but unharmed. Breathing in his scent, ensnared by the molten closeness of their bond, Vader is overwhelmed again by how precious he is. 

_Mine,_ he thinks, left hand sliding up Obi-Wan’s back to curl around the back of his neck. Obi-Wan’s face is still hidden in his neck, but Vader feels how the touch settles him. _You are mine._

_Yes,_ he hears back, so faintly he wonders if Obi-Wan was consciously of it.

“Tell me, Vader,” Sidious says softly. “What do you feel?"

Passion, Vader thinks. “Power,” he answers breathlessly, blinking up at the Emperor. They are one in the same. 

Sidious hums. His earlier displeasure seems to have dissipated in favor of that enigmatic thoughtfulness.

“Yes,” he says, after a moment. “The power of the Dark Side flows through you.” 

_Ah,_ Vader thinks, head tilting. He is no stranger to the Dark Side of the Force, not anymore -- but he has never felt so _one_ with it as in this moment, enveloped in the smell of burnt flesh and the bone-deep howl of the Force, itself.

“It feels good,” he breathes, intoxicated. 

Sidious smiles. 

Vader grins back, a wild laughter bubbling in his chest -- but before he can release it the bond is flooded with despair. Startled, he looks down to see Obi-Wan clutching at him desperately, a violent tremor in his body. 

_I have failed you,_ he hears. _I have failed you I have_ **_failed you_ ** **_I have -_ **

“In light of your blunder, there will be new conditions regarding the omega,” Sidious says suddenly, forcing Vader’s attention from his mate and the ferocity of those thoughts.

Frowning, he keeps Obi-Wan tucked close as he turns to face Sidious, who goes on, “Kenobi will remain here in the Imperial Palace from now on. He will not leave unless accompanied by you, Vader, and you are prohibited from taking him off-world.”

Vader goes stiff with outrage, but Sidious isn’t done. 

“As of now, you will leave immediately for Murkhana to root out those responsible for the Jedi’s escape. I shall leave the details of the traitors’ fates to you; your primary objective will be to find the Jedi and bring them to me.”

“But, Master,” Vader starts, pulling away from Obi-Wan at last. Blood roars in his ears, pounds in his skull. _“My mate -- “_

“Will be well taken care of, in your absence,” the Emperor cuts in, his tone brooking no argument. “I shall see to it, myself.”

He pauses, watching Vader as if he can see the rage congealing in him, held at bay only by the knowledge that Obi-Wan’s life hangs in the balance. Vader trembles with it, barely biting back a snarl as the Emperor tells him, “I expect you to depart within the next few hours. Go and see Kenobi to your quarters, then return to me for your briefing with Moff Tarkin.”

 _“Very well,”_ Vader growls, because there’s nothing else to say. Obi-Wan should already be dead following his outbursts; if this is Sidious’s attempt at compromise, then Vader has no choice but to accept, even if the alpha in him howls and howls at the thought of leaving his mate _now,_ freshly marked and alone. 

_There is no choice,_ he thinks again, trying to will his rage into something controllable. But all he can think of is Obi-Wan alone and unprotected in this hive of enemies, still weakened from his heat and in danger of lapsing into yet another one. Vader’s mark has tricked his body from the brink of death for the time being, but there’s no telling how long that will last.

He thinks of this, and for one perilous instant decides to act -- to ignite his saber and impale Darth Sidious between those knowing eyes. The decision fills him with a sudden, deafening calm. 

But then there is a soft touch at his sleeve, and the honeyed scent of his omega washing over him. Vader looks down to see Obi-Wan crowding close, features pale and strained. He keeps his face turned away from the Emperor as he peers up at Vader, his eyes suspiciously reddened.

 _Don’t,_ he says, and the strange calm dissipates at once. What can Vader do, but heed him? 

“Good, good,” Sidious is saying. “Then you may go.”

The rage returns abruptly, savaging his insides. Gathering what's left of his composure, Vader touches the small of Obi-Wan’s back and turns to leave. 

“Ah, yes,” the Emperor says suddenly behind him. “I’d nearly forgotten.”

He whips in time to see Sidious wave his hand almost lazily. In the next instant the bond grows clouded, its fiery brilliance dimming abruptly as Obi-Wan is cut off from the Force. 

Vader jolts; next to him Obi-Wan makes a sharp, wounded sound, like he’s been punched in the throat. Vader catches him before he can crumple to his knees, though his own head spins with something like whiplash at the loss. 

_“No,”_ Obi-Wan moans, his eyes screwing shut. Vader can still feel his emotions, but they’re only impressions now, not those visceral flares so tangled with his own. 

Scowling, Vader’s hand goes to the back of Obi-Wan’s neck, thumb swiping subtly over the implant in his nape. It’s lodged deep; even if he were to prod at the area, Obi-Wan wouldn’t know it was there.

Vader clenches his jaw against the urge to dig it out, and snarls at the Emperor, “He’s still recovering from his heat.“

“And shall receive the best medical attention in the galaxy,” Sidious says, blatantly amused by Vader’s burgeoning conniption. “Go on now, my apprentice. And be sure to send the guards back in.” 

_He will pay for this,_ Vader tells himself, turning away from Sidious with gnashing teeth. Once he has learned all he can, he will be sure to make the Emperor’s death _slow._

He guides Obi-Wan out of the throne room, past the royal guards and their silent stares, assuaging his fury with thoughts of revenge -- what it will look like, when the time comes. 

Obi-Wan, for his part, is silent the entire way to Vader’s quarters, located in the newly-renovated northwest corner of the Palace. He walks with his head bowed and his back stiff, white-knuckled fists at his sides. Only when the doors slide shut behind them does he tear away from Vader, ignoring their opulent surroundings to rub harshly at his bloodless face. 

“Where’s the refresher?” he croaks into his hands. When Vader tells him, Obi-Wan immediately rushes in its direction, his once-effortless grace abandoned. 

Vader trails him, scowling. This is all so _wrong._ If Obi-Wan hadn't been so stubborn and accepted him from the start, all of this would have been avoided. They would still be on Naboo, likely tangled together in bed. 

Now...

He glares at the door to the fresher, buzzing with the urge to break something as he listens to Obi-Wan dry heaving. His mate is thin and pale, still weak from his near-fatal heat. He must be taken care of, tucked away and fed and soothed. 

“Obi-Wan,” he calls softly through the door. “Are you - ?”

He bites back the stupid question, probing instead at the bond. Though significantly weakened, he can still feel the turbulent pulse of Obi-Wan’s emotions, and after a moment Vader opens the door. 

Obi-Wan is knelt over the toilet, breathing hard. He stiffens at Vader’s approach, shrinking away when Vader moves to touch him. Hurt -- _anger_ \-- lashes Vader’s insides, but he stomps it down, kneeling next to Obi-Wan instead.

“I don’t want to leave you,” he whispers, daring to reach out and lay his hand on the nape of Obi-Wan’s neck. Like before Obi-Wan relaxes almost involuntarily; encouraged, Vader crowds in closer, his thumb swiping soothingly over Obi-Wan’s skin.

“I’ll come back as soon as I can, I swear it.” 

Obi-Wan says nothing, but his eyes go soft and glazed suddenly, nostrils flaring while he breathes in Vader’s scent. Vader can sense how much it comforts him, and a terrible longing opens in his chest as Obi-Wan slowly leans into him, hand coming up to grip his forearm. 

“No harm will come to you while I’m gone,” Vader vows, wondering how Obi-Wan would react to a kiss. Before he can see, Obi-Wan jolts as if awoken from a dream. 

“Is that what you think this is about?” he rasps, abruptly throwing Vader’s hand from him. 

Rising on unsteady legs, Obi-Wan maneuvers out of Vader’s attempts to pull him back down and goes instead to the nearby sink, where he proceeds to rinse his mouth out. 

“It wasn’t enough to betray us,” he says when he’s finished, locking eyes with Vader in the mirror. “But to hunt down our remnants on the orders of that _beast…”_

He turns to face Vader, and his gaze is cold fire.

“Make no mistake, you are a pawn,” Obi-Wan says, with the sort of venom he only ever aimed at enemies, before. “Whatever game Palpatine is playing, you can be sure you’ll lose.”

“Do you think so?” Vader murmurs, closing the distance between them. He will not let Obi-Wan rile him, not again. Not when Vader will be gone from him for who knows how long, and aching every moment of it.

Crowding Obi-Wan against the sink, Vader gives into the urge to grab his waist and pull him close, relishing the way he gasps. 

“The Emperor is but a means to an end,” he says softly, again weighing the risk of leaning in for a kiss. “Nothing more.” 

Before Obi-Wan can reply, Vader leans in to nose against his cheekbone, lips grazing that oddly-smooth cheek. He hears a quiet hitch of breath. Heat stirs low in his belly as Obi-Wan grips his arms, scent sweetening with arousal.

When Vader pulls back to look at him, it’s to find that soft glazed look again. Obi-Wan’s pupils are blown, his face flushed a lovely pink. He is all of Vader’s oldest fantasies come to life. 

The revelation makes him giddy, ravenous.

“Stop worrying so much,” Vader whispers, leaning in. His heart pounds. “Everything will be alright, I promise you.”

Obi-Wan’s grip tightens on his arms, but he doesn’t push Vader away as their lips touch. 

He means it to be chaste -- a brief concession to the alpha raging in his depths -- but like an addict the first brush of their mouths drags him under and away. 

Obi-Wan melts against him, pliant in a way Vader never would have imagined before, and it is perfect, he is perfect. 

Gripped at once by wild euphoria, he presses Obi-Wan against the sink, deepening the kiss, and _oh --_

This is something worse than passion, Vader thinks, before there are no more thoughts -- only the wet heat of Obi-Wan’s mouth against his, messy and intoxicating. 

Obi-Wan moans, and the sound goes straight to Vader’s cock; his self-control unravelling, Vader hoists him up and grinds their hips together, groaning in his throat at the delicious friction.

 _Mine._ He lets it flood the muted channel of the bond -- feels it searing through him, body and soul. 

_Mine mine mine_

Obi-Wan gives a muffled gasp and breaks the kiss, his hips rising in little aborted movements even as he plants a hand on Vader’s shoulder, breathing, “Wait.” 

Vader growls, chasing his mouth, but Obi-Wan turns his head away, damnably stubborn. 

_“Wait,”_ he says again, chest heaving. He is beautifully disheveled, with his mussed hair and reddened mouth, a deep flush across his cheekbones. Vader grips his thighs, sick with want. 

“What is it?” he asks, trying and failing to soften the impatience from his voice.

To his dismay, Obi-Wan begins to try and untangle himself, avoiding his eyes as if Vader can’t feel the desire simmering through the bond, or better yet the erection pressed against his own. 

He can’t suppress a growl as Obi-Wan attempts to slide off the sink, away from him. Obi-Wan freezes, and Vader pulls him back before he can think better of it, nostrils flaring at the familiar musky sweetness drifting from him in faint but tantalizing waves. 

“Why must you do this?” Vader demands, even as his mouth waters and his cock twitches. “If you would stop being so stubborn and let me take care of you, things would be easier for the both of us.”

The consummation of the bond would make their separation marginally more bearable -- and most importantly guarantee Obi-Wan’s safety from opportunistic alphas in his absence , a bigger problem than he's wanted to contemplate, till now. 

The Emperor’s favor has earned Vader countless political rivals since the inception of the Empire, the most foolish of which would jump at the opportunity to challenge his influence and usurp his mate.

The very thought makes him see red, but before he can stress this to Obi-Wan he shrugs out of Vader’s grip, snarling, “And what exactly would you have me do, Anakin? Let you -- let you _spend yourself in me_ before running off to hunt Jedi? Are you mad?”

Shaking his head vehemently, he forces his way out of Vader’s grip at last and continues, “How many have you killed already? Do _you_ even know?”

Vader doesn’t, but the Togruta girl and her death rattle fills his head all of a sudden.

A hairline crack bisects the mirror over the sink as he looms over Obi-Wan, hands curling into fists.

“That doesn’t matter,” he murmurs, that hollowness opening within him as Obi-Wan’s disgust pulses through the bond like a bruise. _You must not let him rile you_ , a small voice says, but there is something else -- something louder -- swelling darkly in his skull. 

_Look,_ it says. 

Vader looks. He sees in the sterile wash of light what he didn't want to, before. 

Here -- here is Obi-Wan Kenobi, Paragon of the Jedi Order, disheveled but straight-backed in his odium, his righteous fury. Even wreathed in Imperial attire and the mark of Darth Vader -- weakened and weaponless and cut off from the Force -- he is a Jedi, still. 

_This person will never be yours,_ says the dark thing in his skull, sibilant. _He must be remade._

The revelation startles Vader; he feels himself expanding with it, sees Obi-Wan’s eyes narrow then grow wide as the lights flicker around them and his tawny hair lifts in a nonexistent breeze.

He steps back. Vader steps forward. 

“Anakin,” Obi-Wan’s voice is sharp with warning, and indeed would have stopped Anakin Skywalker in his tracks. 

But Vader is a different creature; a superior being. 

That Obi-Wan can’t see this is more proof he’s been going about everything the wrong way. 

He feels himself smile as he reaches for Obi-Wan -- then laugh when his mate darts out of his reach and flees the fresher. 

_A chase,_ Vader thinks, blood thrilling. _Very well._

The dark thing singing in his bones, Vader stalks after him. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Palpatine is so hard to write. he's like 50% the reason for the delay in this chapter, i swear.
> 
> i hope y'all are staying safe in these wild times. take care, and thanks so much for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> this fic constitutes a lot of firsts for me. It's my first time playing in the Star Wars sandbox, for one: i'm regrettably not super knowledgeable about the larger universe outside of the movies, so i beg forgiveness in advance if there are any holes or inconsistencies! 
> 
> i'm also gonna be trying my hand at the A/B/O world for the first time (though I've read too many of them to count haha), and i'm super excited about that. we're gonna have fun with it, stay tuned
> 
> [title is taken from a florence and the machine song that needs much more love]


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